history Quotes

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

People like to talk about war.

'Legality' is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.

There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.

The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?