Historical Trajectory Quotes

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

'Human history, ' H.G. Wells once wrote, 'becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.' You and I cannot be indifferent to the outcome of that race. We care deeply about the winner. Because we do care so deeply about the winner, that is why we are all in the East Room of the White House today.

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

Given the accelerating velocity of history, we should begin charting deliberately the next phase in its trajectory.

Sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore. Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out.

Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.

Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.

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

Nations, as well as man, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.