What Is History? Part 22

feature photo

No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith: The old is better.  —Luke 5:39

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples.  —Paul Craig Roberts

Consistency is the touchstone of truth.  —Ilana Mercer

If you have ten thousands of regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.  —Winston Churchill

The more corrupt the government, the more numerous the laws.  —Tacitus (amateur translation)

. . . in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is hated.  —William Lind

A country can prosper without dukes, while a strike by the plumbers would be disastrous.  —Fred Reed

OK, on the plane.  Now.  —James P. Coyne on Iraq “exit strategy”

Countries continually repeat each other’s mistakes with a time lag.  What one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.  —Solzhenitsyn

After several generations, American foreign policy is determined by its own momentum.  —Chilton Williamson

Cops are basically historians who come to a crime scene after the fact.  —Bill Buppert

. . . a national civilisation which rots the life of a people to the core . . . the goal to which our process in civilisation is guiding us.  —R.E. Lee on post-1865 America

Money loses its value when it becomes too abundant.  —Copernicus

. . . we cannot reasonably apply the moral codes and values of today to the past.  To attempt to do so involves one in the unhistorical practice of “presentism”—the assumption that current standards are absolutely right and all others are wrong.  This sitting in judgment prevents the student of history from understanding the people of the past, since the past is condemned out of hand for not being the present.  All earlier people are deemed to be wrong because they are not us.  —Michael R. Bradley

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.