Historians From The United States

"Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others."

"In sum, the Nobel Peace Prize often has nothing to do with peace and too much to do with war. It frequently sees "peace" through the eyes of the western plutocracy. For that reason alone, we should not join in the applause."

"For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers, peasants, students, and others in countries around the world. His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group. Another brother established an intelligence operation with the CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency. The Dalai Lama was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country."

"Someone once said that Margaret Thatcher satisfied the average Englishman's longing for the perfect dominatrix. No doubt about it, she could deliver pain. The Iron Lady should best be remembered as the Leather Lady. Indeed, today Thatcherism leaves its dreary imprint not only on the Conservative Party but---thanks also to Tony Blair---on a Labor Party that accepts most of her regressive policies."

"In every class society that's ever existed, the ruling element does not rule nakedly. They always adorn their rule with myths, themes and symbols to justify their position at the apex of the social pyramid."

"Our fear that Communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has."

"Margaret Thatcher, who we all know is Ronald Reagan in drag."

"The Third World is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! Only the people are poor. But there's billions to be made there, to be carved out, and to be taken. There's been billions for 400 years! The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labour. They have taken out of these countries. These countries are not underdeveloped, they're overexploited!"

"The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship."

"Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians."

"Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically."

"The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past."

"One of its [the First World War’s] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe … This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul."

"This [the Mediterranean] is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycenaean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State."

"The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers, a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur, and our present reliance on the influences of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values."

"Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it, but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Either the races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort, or else they ultimately amalgamate, and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails."

"Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate."

"If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished."

"The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.”"

"Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels."

"Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated."

"To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states."

"What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?"

"In the midst of events there is no perspective."

"His (Deschamps’) complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb."

"For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use."

"The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century."

"History is the unfolding of miscalculations."

"To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup."

"Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war."

"If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?"

"Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.”"

"For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions."

"What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact."

"Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control."

"When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”"

"Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex."

"In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record."

"When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined."

"The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek."

"Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers."

"Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man."

"Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself."

"That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages."

"Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible."

"Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply)."

"on the Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission 1943 in Stevenson, Richard. Bengal Tiger and British Lion: An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943. United States: iUniverse, 2005."

"Whatever the fiasco, aplomb is unbroken. Mistakes, failures, stupidities and other causes of disaster mysteriously vanish. Disasters are recorded with care and pride and become transmuted into things of beauty. Official histories record every move in monumental and infinite detail but the details serve to obscure."

"Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. UK: Oxford University Press, 1975. p.175"

"During October 1962, John F. Kennedy frequently cited Barbara Tuchman’s celebrated bestseller August 1914, published a few months earlier. Tuchman’s account is disputed by some modern scholars. On one point, however, her view seems incontrovertible. None of the belligerent powers wanted the big war they got. But Austria-Hungary and Germany willed a small one, to crush and dismember Serbia, and some German generals were eager to seize an opportunity to humble Russia before her rising military might became overwhelming. The players lost control of events, with consequences for Europe that proved calamitous."