Best Historical Perspective Quotes

"We live by all objective standards in the best time period to be alive in history."

"Ancient cultures understood androgyny, and there's plenty of historical precedent for the idea that an androgynous personality is actually more of an ideal."

"The history of technology is there's displacement, but technology always creates more jobs."

"Steven Pinker's view of poverty is a common one: for most of humanity's history, we found ourselves in poverty and it was only with the rise of Capitalism, or The West, or The Enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it, that we escaped this trap."

"The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

"The field of archaeology recently saw some monumental discoveries that are rocking the foundation of what we think we know about ourselves."

"The truth is that future generations will look back at this precise moment with awe."

"America's acting like it's September 10th, and we better remember what September 12th felt like."

"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

"Victory depended not only on the force of American arms, but also on the faith in American hearts."

"The moment you start thinking about what these events involved, the temptation to become bitterly angry and passionate is strong, but I try to be dispassionate about it."

"When we were kids and we were learning about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, we all had this idea like, if I was there I would have stepped up, I would have said something."

"The greatest times in American history...we had a national mission we all believed in."

"About a hundred years ago, they thought they were closing in on everything there was to learn, and then suddenly it was a hundred times more."

"Martin Luther King would roll over in his grave."

"Live and let live, and let them do their own thing, but if you want to live in the 19th century, don't try to drag the rest of the world back there with you."

"Every president is appealing to two constituencies: one, of course, the American public, but the other is history."

"Plato and his interlocutors...don't have the terms for [certain concepts] and they're sort of inventing distinctions in terms as they go along, sometimes making rather embarrassing mistakes by today's standards."

"The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation."

"Practically everything we've invented has been in the last 200 years because it accelerates."

"Infant mortalities are way down, you know, like the norm for people growing up like a hundred or 150 years ago is that multiple of their children would die."

"Every generation looks back in wonder at the incredible mistakes of our forebears."

"Good times make weak men, and weak men make bad times."

"The religion of the ancient Egyptians... it felt good. They survived for 3000 years until we brought our own man-made religion which didn't make sense at all."

"All I can hope is that history will reflect in a positive vein on what the Vietnam veterans did and tell the truth about them."

"We've made tremendous progress on all sorts of dimensions in the last three or four hundred years."

"Every generation is telling their kids that they're about to go to the worst times in world history, and here we are; we survive."

"Every manipulation that has ever occurred throughout history ends someday, and this will end, and the price will go up."

"You can look at these transitionary periods between modes of productions and take guesses about how people are going to figure these things out to remedy the problems they're faced with."

"The very same CEO who made millions of dollars by being the first champion of maximizing shareholder value in the '60s called it the dumbest idea in the world."

"What we do consistently in the book and in our teaching and in our lives is try to understand what we've been, who we are...and thus make the most meaning that we can from what we've been to what we can be."

"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

"I am confident humankind will look back on this period and be proud that when we saw, we acted."

"This is the thing: you can go back to that time where you kind of take those three meals a day... even the word itself, breakfast, means you have to fast. You can't break the fast if you're not fasting."

"We're living in probably the greatest time in all human history."

"It's clear that we're not talking about cabbages here; this is about the commodification of human life."

"There is something naive about the view that we now know better than anybody else that lived a long time ago, and something perhaps even arrogant about it."

"We have a deeply skewed idea of what human history looked like, shaped by state propaganda, folk history, works of fiction, capitalist realism, and religion."

"If anyone ever tells you that there's no class system in this country or that we've progressed far from the Victorians, just show them a picture of David Cameron."

"We've made huge strides with LBJ's War on Poverty in the 60s, but then we just parked the bus and let the problem persist."

"It was a Paris of the East to some, a place of unspeakable poverty to others."

"We happen to be lucky enough to be living at the one time in history where we can look up at the night sky and honestly say that we more or less understand what it is we're looking at."

"Transformativity has existed long before fan fiction has."

"Instead of a nation crushed and then created by invaders, I've found a strong society with a unique and lasting culture."

"Coup attempts... History says coups are not good."

"We have been through contentious and even violent elections before in our history and people have defended the right to vote."

"We're lucky to live in an age where this is possible because any other time in history, this task would have been extremely difficult."

"One of the best things that ever happened to the West was the Soviet Union because it reminded us what we stood for."

"There is nothing worth nuclear war, but Winston Churchill said it brilliantly when he said that war is horrible, slavery is worse."

"It's important to think about where you want to stand on the side of history."

"The Soviet Union will be looked at in history not as the end of communism but as its first valiant experiment."

"Brainwashing or coercive persuasion continues to be active and to develop even a century later."

"The power to visually capture and replicate a moment in time would be considered magic a few hundred years ago."

"We've always been entrepreneurial, whether that entrepreneurialism was stifled by outside forces or not, the fact is we've always had that energy."

"The idea of a global pandemic feels like something reserved only for the distant past and dystopian television, but the truth is, it was always a case of when a virus was going to consume the world again, not if."

"Commonly it is considered a great misfortune for America that Negro slaves were ever imported."

"Objectively speaking, if we take a look at all the different periods of human history, we are living in one of the easiest times ever."

"In the case of the rose-colored past lovers, probably about the time they have to take a crap and realize toilet paper without splinters wasn't a thing until about a century ago."

"By historical standards, we live like royalty, and it's very easy to take for granted all of our modern luxuries."

"Imagine someone in the 1800s trying to explain a jet engine... they wouldn't be thinking about these combustion engines in the same way."

"The long-term trend, though halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing."

"The agenda here today is to restore a biblical and truly historical view of Jesus, the real Jesus."

"Believe it or not, and I know most people do not, violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species' existence."

"I started out as a fixed income mortgage trader at Goldman in the '80s, right before the '87 crash, so I've seen one of these cycles before." - Dan Morehead

"The ancients were not heartless but compassionate."

"The world was peaceful when conservatives had control, circa 2000? Are you forgetting that we started two multi-decade Middle Eastern conflicts under Bush?"

"It's an interesting time in history to have lived through this."

"We need to start reassessing the position we're in and perhaps recovering some of the virtues that allowed the people from that time to get through that time."

"How do we still keep getting such dog PC ports? It's 2024, 224 years since the death of Christ; how is this still an issue?"

"Nothing is more common to the American political experience than watching things change quickly, for better and for worse, and very often for better."

"Nietzsche wishes to supplant the herd morals characteristic of Christianity with a new morals, morals that harken back to the age of the Homeric hero."

"Everything that's being proposed right now by people like AOC and Ilhan Omar are just representative of things that we recognized were a good idea 80 years ago."

"We simultaneously exist in perhaps the most materially prosperous era in human history and the safest area in human history."

"We're living in the best time humanity has ever seen. Ever."

"Liberty is the rare state of affairs in mankind's history. Arbitrary abuse and control by others is the standard dish."

"The position of Ireland maintaining neutrality is still controversial, some see it as a practical position that maintained Irish independence, but others questioned whether it was correct for Ireland to ignore the moral atrocities committed by the Nazis."

"The Russian invasion is indefensible, and the mass slaughter of civilians is not something history will look kindly on."

"Slavery, subjugation of women, repression of homosexuals...wasn't very common perfectly well accepted in Western culture not very far back."

"But to the enslaved people who were behind the stage about to be auctioned off, this wasn't Hiring Day. They referred to it as Heartbreak Day."

"The fight...is because you believe Hitler and Nazi Germany are a risk to all civilization, all human beings, all freedoms."

"Less time separates us from Julius Caesar than him from the builders of the pyramids."

"Anyone that thinks that liberal societies haven't reformed themselves in really major ways over the last 150 years just hasn't been paying attention."

"Despite our world of perceived horror and chaos, people are living longer, happier, healthier, and freer lives right now more than any other time in human history."

"There's no question, but to push forward almost like we're coming out of the Dark Ages. Medicine's been based on rough symptomology and a little bit of hocus pocus without knowing the true molecular nature of what's going on."

"Oh yeah, It’s a shame what happened to them… but you know… they were just in the way."

"Many in China have a chip on their shoulder from that, especially towards the countries that bullied them and treated them as inferior."

"Lincoln said once, 'If America should fail, it will fail and it will be toppled by a destroyer named us.' And I think he's right."

"Do you think that Harriet Tubman ever worried about who was President of the United States when she was on the Underground Railroad?"

"There were serious people who were considered experts of their day that held this opinion... It seems unfathomable right now, doesn't it?"

"Mississippi setbacks then represented what we see in the nation now, and all these themes are only magnified here."

"We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely."

"It'll blow your mind how much dating has changed in 100 years."

"Of course, there was an element of truth to his fears because some things went badly wrong during the Industrial Revolution."

"For queer people, I recommend 'Bent.' And yes, I'm saying queer because 1940s Germany didn't exactly have a great understanding of sex and gender."

"If the US government won, it was called a battle. If the Native ones, it was called a massacre."

"My policy for the Cold War is simple and some would even say simplistic: we win, they lose."

"World War II was won by the Russians. It was won by Russian lives... they lost over 20 million people in World War II, dwarfing casualties of the Allies by orders of magnitude."

"The great problem is that we've tended to assume...it is inevitable that the west will triumph."

"Alzheimer's Research UK is focused on overcoming dementia so that future generations will only be reading about diseases like Alzheimer's as much as we read about the bubonic plague and smallpox."

"We work too much. This is a pretty recent phenomenon, and so this fact makes us unusual, historically."

"We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans; it was pure raw false propaganda."

"The '60s were a time when we were not scared. We believed in the possibility of all things."

"We have a experiment that's now lasted a couple hundred years, and clearly we are getting better."

"Credit Suisse has been a problem child in investment banking for as long as I can remember."

"Every mass extinction in the past 4.5 billion years is related to climate change."

"It's never been a better time to be a human because all those before us have suffered."

"My father was impressed with Huey P. Long even though at the time in the South, blacks couldn't vote."

"Imagine what Churchill would have had to do... without an army, without a basis to be able to defend itself, Britain would have been so much more vulnerable."

"I think they (Enlightenment figures) would be thrilled beyond belief to be time transported to the present and to see the kind of progress that's being made."

"It's just staggering, the things that people sacrificed and endured."

"God has sustained us... through plagues, through disaster, through war, through disease, through pestilence."

"The establishment of the true religion on earth is the Prophet Muhammad refining and restoring the true law of Moses and true Abrahamic monotheism."

"Adam Smith would be called a filthy commie today."

"Future generations will look back on this day... the same way that we now look back on the abolition of slavery or the defeat of the Germans in World War II."

"The idea of canceling entire historical figures or works of art or scientific ideas because the people who engaged in them were of their time and flawed is obviously a road that we should not want to go down."

"When congressional oversight is abused, history doesn't treat it well."

"His story is one of extraordinary physical courage and then allied to moral courage... he carried on making the same truths about Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s... and didn't change his stance when he was being attacked."

"The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history."

"We live like gods compared to most of the human beings in history."

"As students of history, we must seek the historical truth through knowledge, understand the context of historical events, and recognize that people in the past were just like us, who lived in different circumstances."

"Rather than condemning colonization, we should embrace its positive aspects: courage, heroism, altruism, innovation."

"It is very important for us to understand each other. It's very important for us to be honest with the history of this planet and where we are going."

"It was about them wanting the right to keep slavery and not have it interfered with, and spread that slavery to new states."

"Slavery was never based on race, and so nowhere in the Bible does it condone enslaving a race of people."

"We're not living in the 1990s. We're not living in the 1980s, we're living in a different time."

"Historic gaps in income inequality... it's just the tale as old as time."

"The United States loves war, and the United States loves to provoke wars. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the last 70 years of United States history, if you disagree with me, well, you're wrong."

"Never in human history did young women go off and live on their own successfully."

"Dem tell me, dem tell me what they want to tell me... but now I checking out my own history, I carving out my identity."

"This produced an attitude which was that it was the job of a man who was a citizen of a polis, beyond anything else, to fight bravely in the ranks of his army."

"We start in ancient Africa because we did not want to reinforce the notion, either implicitly or explicitly, that Black history started with slavery or the slave trade."

"The concerns that George Washington had about partisan politics seem to be more acute now than I've ever seen it before."

"Human beings are currently in a climate Renaissance. We're far safer from climate-related disasters than ever."

"The number of people that die from natural disasters has declined over 90 percent over the last 100 years."

"The great peace and prosperity we've experienced... is not the norm in human life."

"Prohibition in a general sense does work. We often refer to Prohibition as like drugs and alcohol as a failure."

"We severely underestimate the intelligence of people in the past. We think that since we have iPhones, we're inherently more rational, moral, and intelligent. However, the truth is that we just have more stuff."

"We often view classical civilization with rose-colored glasses today in our study of history."

"Governments throughout history, in almost every single circumstance, are really, really bad."

"The tale of the artist unrecognized in their era, one that tragically and dutifully toiled at works that were never offered respect, is nearly mythologized."

"The sentiment of working to make the world a better place is within the realm of probability for a 12th-century individual."

"Slavery is a commonplace of human experience going back to antiquity. Emancipation, freedom for the slaves, the abolition of slavery, that's a new idea. That's a western idea. That's an enlightenment idea."

"If you had to be born at any moment in human history, and you didn't know ahead of time whether you were gonna be black, white, Asian, Latino, that you didn't know whether you were gonna be, what country you were from or you're male or female or gay or straight, and you just said, well, you're blind. You're behind a veil. When do you wanna be born? You'd choose now."

"Let history say of us, these were golden years when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."

"Rome didn't fall because of migration; it fell when it started acting against its knowledge that migration, when handled intelligently and compassionately, is a benefit."

"For me, it's always that first time you have to figure something out, that first time you do something new, the problem solving and being able to look back and really understand how problems were solved. That to me is what makes for fascinating history."

"The world was absolutely lush in a way it had never really seen before."

"As the 80’s gave way to the 90’s, Rover’s future was looking bright."

"The Sahara Desert was a highway; it wasn't a barrier."

"You have this paradigm shift. Speaking of the Henry Ford days and the horses, right, it's like back in those days if you ask people what do you want your transportation to improve, the answers would be something like, well, yeah, horse eats a lot, maybe needs to eat less, to be stronger, carry more weight."

"If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more."

"If the movement is towards hate and exclusion, that's typically and historically a bad movement."

"It's no wonder that during the Middle Ages, most people were lucky to live past their 40th birthday."

"We live in the most absurdly magical time in the history of Earth, a time in which children aren't dropping dead all around us, a time in which you can ask the god machine in your pocket a question and get an answer."

"World War I was basically a complete lack of neutrality. Everyone was like, 'Yeah, war, yeah! We'll take some stuff; we'll be home by Christmas.' And then they sort of learned their lesson that, hey, maybe war is bad."

"Those were the peaceful, calm, prosperous times."

"Within just over 100 years, all of this happened. That's so like, the growth is ridiculously quick."

"Civilization is not this linear progression; it's a roller coaster of peaks and valleys."

"We cannot study history and most importantly learn from it if we're determined to only look at little pieces of the bigger stories."

"Sometimes you have to go to the past to understand the future."

"The United States did not support, much less cause, the breakup of the Soviet Union."

"Although the Greeks, who are the guys we tend to get most of our perspectives on ancient history from, were loath to say it, the Persians were actually pretty good guys."

"The great gift of humility: One, life is a lot better when you go through it and you try to be humble. But then, you also look back on history and you say, you know, maybe I shouldn't throw stones."

"Science is not an opinion poll. If it was, then Galileo would have been in the block."

"Despite what most people might think based on their diet of cable news and the front page of Reddit, we are living through one of the most peaceful periods in human history."

"These are the things that made us the most successful, most extraordinary nation in the history of the world."

"I think this club over the last 10 years has treated the fans of this football club like [expletive] on the shoe."

"The origins are quite banal and mythologized."

"There's been progress. People say things are getting worse, but look back over history."

"We weren't even close to existing yet, so can you blame anyone for not having all of the answers?"

"They kind of shot themselves in the foot in at least for their narrative not creating a little more Jeopardy on poor old Vince's business and Company going into the thing before it was a raving success."

"We hope for a peaceful and secure Africa where development prevails and is shaped by the abilities of women."

"So I wanted to put this together and let Eugene Stoner explain to you in his own words."

"Just because it's all bad news when it comes to like our history, it doesn't mean we're bad people. It means we could be better and learn from it."

"Hollywood was booming like never before... but like the eras of history, time will inevitably lead to New Beginnings."

"Strom Thurman voted to extend the voting rights act... The man who led the longest filibusters in history against the voting rights act... Even Strom Thurmond came to support voting rights, but Republicans today can't, it won't." —President Biden

"We've seen progress but we've also seen in recent years regression."

"I just felt like, you know, we're in 2020 but it felt like 1867."

"So improve this regression yeah so in our country you've been to the mountaintop and see the glory of the coming of the Lord well I think as Martin Luther King put it they are at the arc is bending upwards."

"Hope is saying this is where we've been, we can do this."

"The suffering of the men within it tells the story of every war fought throughout our history."

"The world without a king like him is progressing at a very slow rate."

"It's mind-blowing to me that this took so long... it feels like it would come before cars."

"It is easy to forget that the ancient people of Egypt were humans like us in many respects."

"When push comes to shove, when chaos hits the fan, all of a sudden now we fall back to the 1950s. The men need to go to war, the men take the risks."

"The Revolution had recovered its true course." - Robespierre

"There's a lot to learn from history when you take off the modern superiority goggles."

"I do not think that it follows then that because the past and the founding of this country was atrocious that we should all just abandon the land."

"History teaches us when a government tries to take your guns, that's the exact government you will soon need to protect yourself against."

"This nation is the greatest nation the world has ever seen."

"Wasn't there anybody that had mercy in his heart to stop this from taking place?" - This really demonstrates the Prophet's tenderness for romanticism.

"From his hilltop home, the Iron Age chieftain who ruled this corner of Anglesey could see the source of his power laid out before him, and he made sure that anyone looking back could see it too."

"Rome didn't exist. All of Roman history had to be then viewed through that lens."

"I think right now there's more opportunity than there ever has been in human history because there's more people that will need more services during these change than ever has in human history."

"What does it mean to be an American? It means we believe in the ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago."

"That's a message, which it seems to me, is as relevant in today's angry 21st century."

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards evil."

"Nations do not die from invasion; they die from internal rotteness." - Abraham Lincoln

"It's a very organic and evolving thing in the 18th century, in the Napoleonic era, there's not really an awful lot of anything that's fixed."

"I'm all for showing less great man history, more diversity in representation."