I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.
Interpretation
Charles Lindbergh expresses the hope that his journals on World War II will help clarify historical issues and their relevance to the present and future.
In this quote, Charles Lindbergh emphasizes the importance of historical documentation and reflection, particularly regarding World War II. He believes that by examining the past through his journals, people can gain insights that will aid in understanding current and future complexities, highlighting the interconnectedness of history and contemporary issues.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of historical documentation, this quote can illustrate how personal accounts enrich our understanding of events.
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life.
Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?
In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced sucess with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.
We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow.
We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.
The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.
The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.
This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.
In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.
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