Ben Sasse Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

Hard distinctions make bad philosophy.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulae exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue.

We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important.

I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.

Throughout history, one of the biggest problems is that the correct course of action is not always obvious, and the obvious course of action is not always correct.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

Always seek the general and never quite trust it.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

The world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.