Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

History

"History does not move in a straight line, but by zigzags." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We feel God present in nature, whether in its awe or its beauty; and in human history, whether in its justice or its weird mysteriousness; and in the life of a good man, or the circumstances of a generous or noble act. Most of all we feel Him near when conscience, His inward messenger, speaks plainly and decisively to us." -

"The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late." - Douglas MacArthur

"The plainest historical evidence for the effectiveness of religion as a positive social form lies in the history of the Jews." - John Macmurray

"The worst type of sin, in fact the only “mortal sin” which has enslaved man for the greater part of history, is the institutionalized sin. Under the institution, vice appears to be, or is actually turned into, virtue. Apathy toward evil is thus engendered; recognition of sin becomes totally effaced; sinful institutions become absolutized, almost idolized, and sin becomes absolutely moral." - Laurenti Magesa

"It’s not enough to be right. That’s too little. It’s also important to be strong. The history of the world shows that more often people who were right lost than won." - Andrzej Milczanowski

"Cooperation, not conflict, has been the most valuable form of behavior for humans taken at any stage of their evolutionary history." -

"The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world." - Eugenio Montale

"When the anonymous masses enter history, it is chiefly to be slaughtered in battle, to die of famine or privation – to illustrate the failures of their betters… We have the mighty pyramids, but no firsthand account of the feelings of the wretches who built them." - Herbert J. Muller

"History consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters." -

"History is written by the winners." -

"If all the records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”… All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”" -

"History is simply the biography of the mind of man." - William Osler, fully Sir William Osler

"[The Bible] is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel." - Thomas Paine

"There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But… the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder… This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes." -

"The human soul, in so far as science can penetrate, is the last chapter of cosmic history as far as it has been written. It is in the soul that Divinity resides." - Michael Pupin, fully Michael Idvosky Pupin

"Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortunes." - Raymond Queneau

"God lives and is observable in the whole of history. Every deed bears witness of him, every moment proclaims his name but especially do we find it in the connecting line that runs through history." - Leopole von Ranke

"History [is] the record of divine manifestations imperfectly understood." - Leopole von Ranke

"The history of morals is the extension of the reciprocal or selfish virtues from the clan to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to all communities living under the same government, civil or religious, then people of the same colour, and finally to all mankind." - Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

"All big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

"The world's history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results." - Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell

"It is precisely the conflict between the good or divine principle, on the one hand, and the evil or adverse principle on the other, which constitutes the meaning of human life and human history, from the beginning to the end of time." - Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel

"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph." - Haile Selassie

"Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is grater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment." - Haile Selassie

"History offers examples of winning in diplomacy after losing in war." - Yoshida Shigeru

"The stumbling block of revelation is the belief in God in time, God in history." - Roger L. Shinn, fully Roger Lincoln Shinn

"Men are free to work out their purposes, and, at the same time, there is a divine purpose in the world which human history fulfills and to which the environment of nature is subordinate. Here God and man meet." - William Ritchie Sorley

"All change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves." - Alfred Edward Taylor

"History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past." - Alfred Edward Taylor

"God’s purpose in history is to save individuals, not as individuals, but as participants in his kingdom, in the unity of all beings under God." -

"Spirit is not a mysterious substance; it is not a part of God. It is God himself; but not God as the creative ground of all things and not God directing history and manifesting himself in its central event, but god as present in communities and personalities, grasping them, inspiring them, and transforming them." -

"All human history from the earliest times to our own day may be considered as a movement of consciousness both of individuals and of homogeneous groups from lower ideas to higher ones." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

"History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened." - Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton

"One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don’t have a history, that they have no roots." - Desmond Tutu, fully Desmond Mpilo Tutu

"We of the modern West are the only people in the whole history of the world who have refused to find an explanation of the universe in a divine mind and will." - Gerald Vann

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." -

"The shallow… consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to human life." -

"Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived." -

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule, the majority are wrong, the minority are right." -

"If we surrender our towns, countryside, and cities to the car, we will also be surrendering many other values that we hold dear: neighborhood life, a sense of history and place, a feeling of belonging somewhere." - Hank Dittmar

"No matter how or when a person acquired their irrational beliefs and self-sabotaging habits, they now, in the present, choose to maintain them - and that is why they are disturbed. One's past history and present life conditions importantly affect one; but they don't disturb one. A person's present philosophy is the main contributor of their current disturbance." - Albert Ellis

"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats." -

"Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason." -

"The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity." -

"When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they have seemed invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it: always." -

"What makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our national distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have led us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations." - Al Gore, Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr.,

"It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise. Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right. It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say?" - Paul Graham

"History is written by the winners." - Alex Murray Palmer "Alex" Haley

"It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are regarded in some quarters among the most monstrous acts of the twentieth century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse." - Nicholas D. Kristof, fully Nicholas Donabet Kristof