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The Journal of Historical Review

Volume 18 Number 1

Quotes

“Nothing can alter my inner soul: I shall pursue my own straight course and shall do what I believe to be right and honorable. “

-- Frederick the Great

“The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.”

-- Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order

“American policy today stirs up everything and settles nothing. The result is that it creates a void, opening the way to new tyrannies instead of new freedoms. At the bottom of America’s attitude is the assumption that all the world wishes to be American. And that assumption is false.”

-- Hadj T'hami el Glaoui, pasha of Marrakesh, in 1944. Quoted in: James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints (1971), p. 18.

“When truth is buried underground, it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.”

-- Emile Zola

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to public traitors.”

-- Benjamin Franklin

“It is always difficult for the non-historian to remember that there is nothing absolute about historical truth. What we consider as such is only an estimation, based upon what the best available evidence tells us. It must constantly be tested against new information and new interpretations that appear, however implausible they may be, or it will lose its vitality and degenerate into dogma or shibboleth. Such people as David Irving, then, have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views.”

-- Gordon A. Craig, noted American specialist of modern German history, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Sept. 19, 1996, p. 8.

“The state budget must be balanced. If the state is not to go bankrupt, public debts must be cut back, the arrogance of the officials must be curbed and brought under control, and payments to foreign governments must be reduced.”

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.

“I have never, for the life of me, been able to understand the conservative. The conservative seems to me to be always clinging to the last thing which the last radical has forcibly tied him to.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, 1927