Historical Change Quotes

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

The 20th century was not only a century of totalitarian systems and wars. It was also the century of decolonization, of a great liberation. Three quarters of the residents of our planet freed themselves from colonial subjugation and - at least formally - became fully entitled citizens of the world. There never had been such an event in all history, and never will be again.

Violence is a holy and historically progressive force.

Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is.

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

History is always changing.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

All presidents are subject to the tides of revisionist history, their legacies constantly in flux.

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.

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.

Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence.

Men make history, not the other way around.

Majority doesn't rule. One person can change the history of the world.

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

History is in motion, and those moving with it are so caught up that they cannot always see its broad outlines

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

We did it. Make no mistake: We have written history. Today there's a change of guards in Denmark.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.