Historical Perspective Quotes

"People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their sili" "The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization." "America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America." "The romantic contrast between modern industry that destroys nature and our forefathers who lived in harmony with nature is groundless" "The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself." "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution." "Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good" "The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home" "The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes" "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it was " "The revolution is not the climax of historical evolution but a conspiracy against it" "World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are the blank pages of history." "If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it." "History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets" "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." "I don’t think our Founding Fathers had the idea that some day we would all be driving around in armored escalades with military weapons in our cars."