Historians

“La tyrannie de la majorité est un danger toujours présent dans les démocraties.”

“The tyranny of the majority is an ever-present danger in democracies, and it is especially threatening to individual liberty because it operates not through the force of law but through the force of opinion.”

“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

“We should not assume that what happened was bound to happen. People made choices, and those choices were conditioned by the experiences and resources available to them.”

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

“The most lasting result of the French Revolution was the metric system.”

“La Méditerranée parle de mille voix; elle est une somme d'histoires individuelles.”

“The Mediterranean speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories.”

“ὦτα γὰρ τυγχάνει ἀνθρώποισι ἐόντα ἀπιστότερα ὀφθαλμῶν.”

“Men trust their ears less than their eyes.”

“في أول الدولة تكون الحضارة بحقائقها وفي آخرها تكون بأسمائها وأشباحها.”

“In the beginning of the dynasty, the weights and measures of civilization are obtained at their full value. At the end, they are given only as shadows and names.”

“Der Staat als Kunstwerk — das war die Leistung der italienischen Tyrannen des vierzehnten und fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts.”

“The state as a work of art — this was the achievement of the Italian tyrants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”

“La féodalité ne fut pas seulement une forme de gouvernement, ni même un type d'organisation sociale au sens étroit. Elle fut une civilisation.”

“The feudal system was not merely a form of government, nor even a type of social organization in the narrow sense. It was a civilization — a particular way of thinking and feeling, a particular attitude toward the world.”

“Krise wurde zur strukturellen Signatur der Neuzeit: der Dauerzustand einer Welt, in der das Alte nicht mehr gilt und das Neue noch nicht eingetreten ist.”

“Crisis became a structural signature of modernity: the permanent condition of a world in which the old no longer applies and the new has not yet arrived.”

“前事不忘，后事之师。”

“Those who look to the past will find a guide for the future.”

“superstites eramus; exemptis cum maxime viris, cum tot optimorum exiliis.”

“Even after an age of destruction and violence, a few survivors may remain; but they will be men who have outlived their own freedom.”

“κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν ξύγκειται.”

“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.”

“The European killing fields were not battlefields. They were, for the most part, places where civilians were brought to be murdered.”

“The twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its ideals, its hopes and its fears are slipping into obscurity.”