Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [41-60] of 271 History quotesHistory QuotesHistory Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.~ Sir Winston Churchill History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.~ Sir Winston Churchill This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline.~ Winston Churchill The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.~ Winston Churchill To be ignorant of what happened before you were born... is to live the life of a child for ever.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?~ Marcus Tullius Cicero For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible--and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us.~ Harlan Cleveland The First Amendment does not require students to leave their religion at the schoolhouse door. … If students can wear T-shirts advertising sports teams, rock groups or politicians, they can also wear T-shirts that promote religion. … Religion is too important to our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools.~ Bill Clinton We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...~ Bill Clinton Nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones or requires all religious expression to be left behind at the schoolhouse door. … Government’s schools also may not discriminate against private religious expression during the school day.~ Bill Clinton Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality.~ Alistair Cooke Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.~ Alistair Cooke A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great.~ Calvin Coolidge Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, `with both eyes open'.~ Copernicus Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print