Historical Legacies Quotes

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

As a Canadian, I've always approached international history as an outsider, neither attacking nor defending key decisions - those were made by actors who are also major figures within national historical traditions for American and British scholars.

The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.

Some failed states have no one but themselves—or rather their corrupt or brutal political elites—to blame. Others never had a chance to start with…, trapped between a no-longer-usable past and a not-yet-accessible future.

China still faces mountains of problems. Some are historical legacies. Others might be the byproducts of our rapid development…. We still have a long way to go. Maybe it’s even good for individuals or nations to have a certain sense of insecurity. This can turn into motivation to work hard.

Governments come and go, but civilizations linger on.

Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.

Most national holidays in most countries rest on selective memories of the past.

If conquest does not bind posterity, so neither can compact bind it.

One of the strongest and most persistent elements in national development has been that inheritance of political traditions and usages which the new settlers brought with them.

I don’t believe in democracy because I don’t believe that any group at any time can change the course and goals of their ancestors…

I work with history because I come from a country that has a tremendous thirst for reality.

None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.

To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future.

The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony.

History is of all subjects the one which is most engaged with people's perceptions of themselves, identity, politics, all those things which shape the modern world.

The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth. Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.