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Wednesday 21st of January 2026

2020 Presidential election The committee understood that for people who care about January 6 — for people to take an interest in the  greatest coup attempt in American history — the violence and treason had to be translated into that universal American language: a good show. Megan Garber, The Atlantic, March 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
2024 Presidential election The great thing about America is, here kings and dictators do not rule — the people do. History is in your hands. The power’s in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. You just have to keep faith — keep the faith — and remember who we are. Joe Biden, speech announcing he's withdrawing from the race for the White House © 2024 Kwiple.com
American exceptionalism The one thing I want my child to know when they get out of school about America is that the worst day in America beats the best day in any other country. A Texas parent, now probably a school board member, testifying at a 2010 review of Texas's standards for teaching history © 2022 Kwiple.com
Asslickers History isn't kind to the man who holds Mussolini's jacket. Ted Cruz, 2016, who started holding it in 2018 in an exchange for an endorsement of his reelection to the Senate © 2019 Kwiple.com
Conservatives say Stand athwart history, yelling Stop,  at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. William F. Buckley, Jr., National Review, November 19, 1955 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conspiracy theories The paranoid's interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” © 2020 Kwiple.com
The Constitution of the United States [T]he proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning origi- nalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement.  Judges are expected to do historical analysis — not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a Fox News host will agree with.  Conservative originalists seem to see them- selves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore, when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror. Adam Setwer, The Atlantic, January/February 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus Everything passes and this will pass. Our country  has gone through many serious challenges.  When tormented by the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians Russia has handled them all. We will defeat this coronavirus contagion. Vladimir Putin, exhorting fellow Russians to overcome the latest scourge to afflict their lands [Because most Russians know as much about Pechenegs and Polovtsians as most Americans know about the Great Disappointment of 1844, a meme depicting two Pechenegs went viral. One asks, “So, are we trending on Google yet?” The other responds, “No. It's the Polovtsians.”] © 2023 Kwiple.com
Energy But it [digital messianism] is also built on a  conceit: tech as the industry of industries; the shaper of events. It is a less tenable conceit than it was a month ago. Tech is relevant in Ukraine; see the propaganda war. But next to the existential role of energy, which keeps Russia solvent, and has the west scrambling for alternative sources, what stands out is the modesty of its bearing on events. Silicon Valley is giving history a nudge here and there, no doubt, but not setting its essential course. That is still the role of people who dig stuff out of the ground for fuel. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Elites Those searching for one-line lessons from history should take note: apparently, it is not the people who decide to be done with democracy; it is elites. Jan-Werner Müller, Democracy Rules © 2021 Kwiple.com
History At least until the eighteenth century, and even to a certain degree thereafter, all events described by an historian were made to conform to an image of reality that governed all social thought. Historians did not argue from the particular to the general, rather they made particular events and people  conform to the traditional types or patterns. Norman E. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, How to Study History  © 2024 Kwiple.com
History Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It's implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy, which is to say those able to work without pay. It's easy to see how this could lead American historical scholarship to adopt a pro-status-quo bias.  In today's world, if you don't have access to elite networks, financial resources or both, it just  doesn't make sense to pursue a career in history. In the future, history won't just be written by the victors; it'll also be written by the well-to-do. Daniel Bessner, New York Times, Jan. 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
History Everything you see is in the past, as far as you are concerned. Katie Mack, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)  © 2021 Kwiple.com
History The “facts of history” do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. Carl Becker, "Detachment and the Writing of History," Atlantic Monthly, October 1910 © 2022 Kwiple.com
History He didn’t want a record of anything. He never stopped ripping things up. Do you really think Trump is going to care about the records act? Come on. A "former senior Trump official" quoted in Washington Post, February 5, 2022, on Trump's habit of repeatedly and knowingly tearing up official White House documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act © 2022 Kwiple.com
History Historians did not discover history: they created it. … The moral problem can be stated simply: the historian, it is held, does not discover  an external reality but in a sense creates one by the synthetic power of his mind. By what right can he then make moral judgements about people in the past that he is describing? If the historian does not discover an objective reality, how can he presume to judge past ages by an objective standard of moral value? Norman E. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, How to Study History  © 2024 Kwiple.com
History History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses © 2023 Kwiple.com
History History is fond of her grandchildren. Nikolay Chernyshevsky [latecomers profit from efforts of predecessors]  © 2022 Kwiple.com
History History is past politics, and politics is present history. Edward Augustus Freeman, Methods of Historical Study  © 2022 Kwiple.com
History  History is the graveyard of aristocracies. Vilfredo Pareto © 2023 Kwiple.com
History History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echos from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark. Katanji Brown Jackson, dissent in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v.  Harvard College and University of North Carolina © 2023 Kwiple.com
History History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Abba Eban, December 16, 1970, speech in London © 2022 Kwiple.com
History If it is a limitation of history that its most important interpretations cannot be absolutely proved, it is also one of the glories of historical study. For it makes history an ever-changing, ever-growing creative subject. It is a fact that a general interpretation rarely goes unchallenged for longer than a generation. Norman E. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, How to Study History  © 2024 Kwiple.com
History If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us. Carl Degler, 1986, annual meeting of the American Historical Association  © 2022 Kwiple.com
History In this paper, we show that the local prevalence of slavery — an institution that was abolished 150 years ago — has a detectable effect on present-day political attitudes in the American South. … That is, the larger the number of slaves  per capita in his or her county of residence in 1860, the greater the probability that a white Southerner today will identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express attitudes indicating some level of “racial resentment.” Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, Maya Sen, The Political Legacy of American Slavery [2016] © 2021 Kwiple.com
History In 2020, the United Kingdom's culture secretary asked Netflix to add a disclosure to the show [The Crown ] making it clear that it is, fundamentally, a work of fiction. Netflix declined, saying it was confident that viewers knew the show was fiction. Yet its executives surely understood that the series is appealing precisely because it presents its fictions with the swagger of settled fact. Megan Garber, “We're Already Living In the Metsverse”, The Atlantic, March 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
History It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow that, because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? © 2022 Kwiple.com
History Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state. Jill Lepore, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 © 2022 Kwiple.com
History Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that whatever happened had to happen. It is also a very satisfying exercise because it seems to confirm that all is always for the best, which cheers  the common man and also suits his betters. However, the trouble with the concept of historical inevitability is that it works only retrospectively, i.e., for the writers of history, not for its makers. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime © 2022 Kwiple.com
History [N]ow that we have become very sensitive about Western interpretations of the non-Western past, this temporal feeling of superiority [of the present over the past] applies more to the Western past than it does to the non-Western one.  We more easily accept the existence of eunichs and harems, for example, than of witches. Because they found a place in a non-Western society, eunuchs and harems seem strange to us but they do not reflect badly on our own past.  Witches, in contrast, seem to challenge the very basis of modern historical understanding and have therefore provoked immense controversy as well as many fine historical studies. Lynn Hunt, May 1, 2002, president, American Historical Association, © 2023 Kwiple.com
History Only a person who knows the past has a future. Wilhelm von Humboldt © 2023 Kwiple.com
History The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command. George Orwell, 1984 © 2024 Kwiple.com
History The past is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change. But the knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft  © 2024 Kwiple.com
History Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? © 2022 Kwiple.com
History There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. Attributed to Vladimir Lenin © 2022 Kwiple.com
History Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, The Life of Reason   © 2022 Kwiple.com
History We are all in favor of learning from history, but we implicitly assume that only good people learn from it. Jan-Werner Müller, Democracy Rules © 2021 Kwiple.com
History We forget most of our past but embody all of it. John Updike, Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels © 2022 Kwiple.com
History What a nation believes about its past is as least as important as what the past actually was.  Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy © 2022 Kwiple.com
History What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama, The Independent, September 20, 1989 © 2022 Kwiple.com
History When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn't die. It eats liberalism. Jill Lepore, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 © 2022 Kwiple.com
History Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four © 2022 Kwiple.com
Ideas Ideas are the dark matter of history. Dierdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Ignorance Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets' red glare, it had nothing but victory. Donald Trump on the War of 1812 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Leadership The statesman's task is to hear  God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past. Otto von Bismarck © 2021 Kwiple.com
Myths in poltics The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology — authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle. Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works © 2023 Kwiple.com
Myths in politics To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by law. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry When nation-states arose our of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins — stories meant to suggest that every- one in, say “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.” Jill Lepore, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Palestinians  Crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past. That's also the lesson of the evictions that have set Israel-Palestine aflame.  More than seven decades ago, Palestinians were expelled to create a Jewish state. Now they are being expelled to make Jerusalem a Jewish city. By refusing to face the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies ensures that the Nakba continues. Peter Beinart, New York Times, May 12, 2021 [Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians during Israel's founding] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Russia Back then, in the 1990s, people like [Irina] Frige [a leader of the Leningrad Memorial Society that preserves facts, images and objects related to the Gulag and its victims] were talking about "de-Communization,” which they imagined  would be like de-Nazification [in Germany]. But twenty years later, she was telling me that I was wrong to talk about forgetting because forgetting presupposes  remembering — and remembering had not happened, or had not happened yet. Masha Gessen, Never Remember  [2018] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Tech bros say Technology makes the past irrelevant --> © 2023 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say I didn't even know there was a history with that phrase. Marjorie Taylor Greene on calling herself a “Christian nationalist” © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say I haven’t given you all a history lesson in a while, and I wanted to give you a little history on homelessness. [In] 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory, and his body language, and how to connect with citizens and then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. It’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a a productive life — or in Hitler’s case, a very unproductive life. Frank Niceley, Republican state senator in Tennessee, supporting a bill to criminalize homeless encampments on public property © 2022 Kwiple.com
War War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality If we now examine the development of the distribution [of property since the end of the eighteenth century] as a whole, we see that the reduction in inequalities took place mainly to the benefit of what  may be called the patrimonial middle class, that is, the 40 percent between the poorest 50 percent and the richest 10 percent. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality © 2022 Kwiple.com
 
the West To regard anything in public life as “inevitable” is to succumb to teleology. Still, with the passing of [Bob] Dole and much of his generation, it is hard to avoid the thought that societies grow rasher and more reckless as their memories of past crises fade. In other words, for the west, whose last existential mess is now a human lifetime ago, there is no avoiding the wages of success. It should expect its politics to wobble and lurch until such time as citizens taste the consequences again. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 7, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com