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"We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgement on the past."
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"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."
"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."
"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics."
"The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
"Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness."
Explore more quotes by Douglas Hurd
"People know they are lacking something, they are constantly wanting some kind of spiritual guidance."
"The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War."
"It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching."
"But it cannot follow that because weapons and troops are now being deployed we are bound to go to war."
"Despite this lamentable lack of balance in our education I do not believe that either children or adults in my country are permeated by a widespread hostility to Germany."
"It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq."
"Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time."
"Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves."
"But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich."
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