Quotes about History

Consider this thought: Adam's entire existence was based upon what he ate. His diet determined his destiny. It also determined the entire course of human history.

All of our people all over the country—except the pure-blooded Indians—are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

We have here a human as well as an economic problem. When humane considerations are concerned, Americans give them precedence. The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected.

December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy

If we look into the matter of how Christian theology rose in the beginning, the Christian Church was always already earlier, and thus even now for each individual the Christian Church is earlier than theology.

Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for a change of heart.

This is the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. There is no journey to God outside of the journey that Jesus made. Since his Son had become all in all, He has brought them all back. Rembrandt's painting is the whole of humanity returning to God, the summary of the history of our salvation.

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.