Craig Shirley Quotes

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

The world's history is the world's judgment.

The justice of our cause must be reflected in the manner in which we rectify the crimes of the past.

After the war, Germany fully confessed to all its dirty tricks. It's necessary to is draw a line under the past, even if people did something evil. Until we do, wounds won't heal.

There is a group that argues that we cannot criticize others because our ancestors did bad things.

Norway as a nation should take collective responsibility for what happened in our country during World War II. I see it as our duty to seek a broad, moral reconciliation and to let this be expressed economically.

There can be no deal, no amnesty for war crimes.

After genocide, justice is impossible …. You cannot put all these people who committed these atrocities to death or in prison.

Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.

Reparations - not just aid - should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and - together with other criminal states - for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.

Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

In my several visits to Germany, I have written in admiration of that country's strenuous efforts to face its past and make amends.

I think fundamentally, I had to make a decision really on whether this was a film about the past or the present. And 'The Act Of Killing' is a film about the present.

It's incumbent on all of us to remember our history and not repeat our past sins.

History is with us until we learn from the suffering of the past.

One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try to make ours light before her!

You cannot turn the clock back, you cannot give the island of Manhattan back to the indigenous, but on the other hand, you can ensure that the indigenous can maintain their way of life.

Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority

The declassified documents are providing a verdict of history where a legal verdict is no longer possible.

As a former member of the IRA, I accept all the responsibilities that are due to me. But in terms of the individual circumstances, I don't comment on that.

When criminals go free, the hope is that history will come in and provide some level of justice. It won't correct the sins, but it will at least record them. The sinners would be known, and the victims' stories would be known.

It is hard to celebrate the past in an ecumenical way, or even in a fair-minded one, apparently. The trouble with the past is not just that it's behind us, it's that it is not even over yet.

The idea behind 'Defending Your Life': Imagine if you had to sit in a courtroom and watch your life. I don't care who you are - if you committed a crime and you had to have all of your emails searched and made public, who on this planet could survive that? Nobody.

Teach her story to future generations, and at least the moral debt owed to Jean McConville can be repaid. Jean McConville. Jean McConville. Jean McConville.

Conservatism's vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the '60s - no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants.