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JSONHistorical Perspective
Sometimes a bit of history lets us understand our present (and our future!) better.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sometime near Christmas of 2002, the commander of a U.S. carrier battle group leaving Norfolk for the Middle East perfectly expressed the will and intention of the United States when he picked up the microphone of the 1MC, the intercom system heard in every compartment of the ship and said,"Peace on earth to men of good will. All others--stand by." | ||||
| Except for ending slavery, fascism, Nazism & communism, war has never solved anything. | ||||
| History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. | Abba Eban | |||
| I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| Peace /n/: A rare state which has only existed when a despot has been fearsome or strong enough to impose it. The image of your head on the end of a stick is a strong incentive toward 'visualizing world peace'. | Boyd Rice | |||
| We're heading down a path similar to that of the Roman empire -- with a sophisticated, self-absorbed upper class enjoying a comfortable lifestyle whose security is maintained by a career military (increasingly foreign or mercenary as Rome declined). | Camille Paglia | |||
| Selecting personally charismatic and compellingly persuasive leaders has rarely worked out well, for any nation, at any point in history. | Carl Pham | |||
| Men think in herds... [and] they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. | Charles Mackay | |||
| Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. | Charles Peguy | |||
| We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years... and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in. | Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State | |||
| Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat. | David Brin | |||
| In the 21st century stupid people will have an inexhaustible supply of cheap, easy ways to screw up their lives. | Duende | |||
| They don't hold White House lunches the way they used to at the beginning of the century. On Jan. 1, 1907, for example, the guest list was as follows: a Nobel prizewinner, a physical culturalist, a naval historian, a biographer, an essayist, a paleontologist, a taxidermist, an ornithologist, a field naturalist, a conservationist, a big-game hunter, an editor, a critic, a ranchman, an orator, a country squire, a civil service reformer, a socialite, a patron of the arts, a colonel of the cavalry, a former Governor of New York, the ranking expert on big-game mammals in North America and the President of the United States. All these men were named Theodore Roosevelt. | Edmund Morris | |||
| When the US was attacked on 9/11, it was as if an elephant had been bitten by a virus-bearing mosquito. But instead of developing a better immune system, we tried to grow bigger tusks and sharper ears. | Eric Haseltine | |||
| From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea--written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo - 'There is no substitute for victory!' | Gen. Douglas MacArthur | |||
| Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it. | Gen. Douglas MacArthur | |||
| I would rather have a German division in front of me, than a French division behind me. | Gen. George S. Patton | |||
| Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. | Gen. George S. Patton | |||
| The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. | George Orwell | |||
| [After World War I] the Allies forced the Germans to promise things that could never be delivered. And using force to exact promises from someone like Saddam Hussein creates about as much security as ordering your cat to guard your home. If the demands are unnatural (as expecting a country in the Middle East to disarm certainly is), you can expect a backlash. | Harry Browne | |||
| There always will be thugs like Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein in the world. But those thugs aren't dangerous to us until we create real grievances that cause millions of people to support the thugs with money, networking, and connections that allow the thugs to threaten us. | Harry Browne | |||
| Columbus would indeed have had to travel 12,000 miles to reach Asia and would surely have perished--but the American continents were in the way. Nobody had dreamed they existed and Columbus, who was completely wrong, won immortal fame by accident. | Isaac Asimov | |||
| 1: What has happened in the past will happen in the future.<br>2: Consider the obvious seriously, for few people will see it.<br>3: Consider the consequences. | Isaac Asimov, Three Laws of Futurics | |||
| Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself. | Jean Francois Revel | |||
| The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. | John Adams | |||
| History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells 'Why can't you remember anything I tell you?' and lets fly with a club. | John W. Campbell | |||
| More battles have been won or lost by quartermasters than by any general staff. | Lois McMaster Bujold | |||
| You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered. | Lyndon Johnson | |||
| Considering all the consequences, the invention of agriculture may just be the worst mistake humanity ever made. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| There is no 'balance of nature.' Ask the dinosaur. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. | Paul Ehrlich | |||
| Few arguments in international diplomacy are so convincing as a convincing victory. | Paul Greenberg | |||
| History is more likely to repeat itself when you ask it to. | Peggy Noonan | |||
| I try to *only* ridicule people whose efforts are sincere. Very little trouble has been caused in the world by insincere efforts. An occasional seduction maybe. There were very few insincere Stalinists or Nazis. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| My first grade class had 63 kids in it, one teacher, no assistant. Before the end of the second semester all 63 could read. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment: good, but not good enough to win. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. | Robert Lynd | |||
| All we have of freedom--all we use or know--This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago. | Rudyard Kipling | |||
| And that is called paying the Dane-geld;<BR> but we've proved it again and again,<BR> that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld<BR> you never get rid of the Dane. | Rudyard Kipling | |||
| Makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you when you sleep, is cheaper than them uniforms, and they're starvation cheap. | Rudyard Kipling | |||
| Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off. | Stewart H. Holbrook | |||
| The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. | Thucydides | |||
| Earlier Romans knew what it was to be Roman, why it was at least better than the alternative, and why their culture had to be defended. Later, in ignorance, they forgot what they knew, in pride mocked who they were, and in consequence disappeared. | Victor Davis Hanson | |||
| The United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. | Victor Davis Hanson | |||
| History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. | Winston Churchill | |||
| If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse fate. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. | Winston Churchill | |||
| Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. | Winston Churchill | |||
| The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong. | Winston Churchill | |||
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