Quotes on History

History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass.

Your loss we count as our loss. Your struggle we take as our struggle.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

We fight to exist. Personally, I am not ashamed of fighting to exist. We are doing no very extraordinary thing to fight simply because we do not wish to be enslaved or exterminated.

Yes, making mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep... For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that an' Chuck him out, the brute! But it's Saviour of his country, when the guns begins to shoot!

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

What is still more to our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.

World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.

Is not that state a warning and a judgment for our heavy sins as a nation?

The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country and live in our fashion.

I surrender this rifle to you through my young son, whom I now desire to teach in this manner that he has become a friend of the Americans. I wish him to learn the habits of the whites and to be educated as their sons are educated. I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.

If you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you.

This was the Athenians' war against the King of Macedon, a war of words. Words are the only weapons the Athenians have left.

We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.