Michael Wayne Godwin Quotes

I remember learning about the Holocaust when I was in kindergarten and being terrified. I think we even watched a graphic video about it in Jewish day school. Although I was quite young, I remember making these vows to myself such as, I'm never going to love my country so much that I can't leave in a moment's notice.

I was not a member of the SS.

At the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in Austria, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in Austria was much more pervasive than in Germany. And Austrians took to Nazi ideas and anti-Semitism much more readily than Germans did, really.

I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.

We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.

The leader of Iran made one of the most repugnant remarks the international community has heard since Adolf Hitler.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves.

It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.

It's so important for people to pay attention to history and learn from it, because it's the only thing we've got that's going to help us figure out where we are going. Especially the way things are manipulated in the press today. You have to sort through so much stuff to figure out what is real and what is not. It gets harder every day.

Trivializing the Holocaust is the last thing I want to do.

Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

Hitler was the right and logical leader for the German people, it would be a tragedy if he was overthrown.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

There is nothing more dangerous than mislearning the lessons of history.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

I think criticism, or a critical engagement with history, has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled.

As I matured, I became a smarter person, a more sensitive person, a more thinking person.

As fearsome as Covid-19 is, it is not the Nazis.

Unless you understand the history of a situation, you can't ever hope to solve problems.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.'

When you start getting into your politics it's like you have to be vulnerable and you have to be sort of sensitive. Because if it's always like straight aggression all the time, there becomes no empathy for the stance that you're taking. You're not telling people to think, you're telling them what to think. And also you have to be honest with yourself on that, too.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas.