William E. Vaughan Quotes

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

Looking back... it's hard to understand what all the fuss was about as things changed in just a few years. When you look at all the things that have happened in the world, it seems very small.

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

We must not become perpetually distracted from the great challenges facing our country and the world.

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

Educate yourself on what's going on around the world where children are dying. Educate yourself on what's going on in Africa.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

Every age has its problem, by solving which humanity is helped forward.

Our youth must always be free, discussing and exchanging ideas concerned with what is happening throughout the entire world.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

There is a convergence of crises that makes it challenging to keep the world's attention.

Muslims are very keenly aware of the history of their community, of the history of that relationship between their community and the rest of the world. And they have had this all through the centuries and are very much heightened by modern communications. I mean now you have Muslims in the Muslim world who can compare their situations with people elsewhere and they find that very humiliating.

History's long arc is different than the today's headlines.

I think language is the most important thing that human beings have ever accomplished, and the only thing that's really going to get us all out of the troubles that we find ourselves in.

As with much of the world's problems, they become public--or much more of interest--the moment they begin to impact the West.

Centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events.

The West has never been all of the world that matters. The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West.

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

A phenomenon occurs but because you're in the middle of it, you just think it's your life-until it's over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the '60s.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.