History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
I have been blessed to win a number of awards and be involved in numerous historical baseball moments over my 20-year career with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres.
The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.
It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.
The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.
Why did John Wilkes Booth do it? In My Thoughts Be Bloody young historian Nora Titone is one of the few to have genuinely explored this question. In doing so, she has crafted a fascinating psychological drama about one of the central events of the Civil War: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. This book promises to stimulate lively historical debate, and will be a treat for every Civil War buff who always pondered that haunting question, “what made him pull that trigger?” Bravo on a marvelous achievement.
The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debts.
There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. [Adolf] Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.
Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.
No civilization can exist part free and part slave. . . We have never had any other kind of civilization. It has always been that way. There has always been a division of man. There has always been the conqueror and conquered-the master and slave-the ruler and the ruled-the oppressor and the oppressed. There has never been content nor unity. There has been only discontent and disunity.
The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.
However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,--i. e. , the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
The New York Federal Reserve is a tool of the big banks.
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.
As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world - and I can assure you more are on the way.
The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.
Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.