Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness.
If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.
I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.
What gets in our way is history and culture and religion and economic conditions. It is part of the hypnosis of our social conditioning.
As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God's word to justify bigotry and persecution.
John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
In the Confederate Army, an officer was judged by stark courage alone, and this made it possible for the Confederacy to live four years.
Confederate monuments belong in museums where we can study and reflect on that terrible history, not in places of honor across our state.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.
We are not being arrogant or complacent when we are said that our country, as a united nation, has never in its entire history, enjoyed such a confluence of encouraging possibilities.
Senior year in college, a kind of confluence of events came together to have me pursue a career in acting. I was planning on being a lawyer; I double majored in history and political science. I took the LSAT and did horribly on it, and that was one thing that made me rethink a new direction.
The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.
In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?
Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube. But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history.
