A Quote by Abba Eban

A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal.

Abba Eban

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History Ideal Image Nation Writes

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Abba Eban
Israeli - Diplomat
February 2, 1915 - November 17, 2002

History teaches me that the dollar rules and whoever writes history writes it however they want.

Danielle Colby

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

Frantz Fanon

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

Elizabeth Janeway

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

Stephanie Coontz

In the wake of newly-alleged prisoner abuse this week, Senator John McCain said that continued mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is hurting the nation's image. Also hurting the nation's image: letting people drown when it rains.

Amy Poehler

The heart of assimilation process of absorbing minorities lies in the self-image of a nation. There are, as you will know, big differences for instance between the self-image of the French and the English. And the Germans, in accordance with their rather chequered history, had at least in the past very little capacity for absorbing minorities.

Norbert Elias

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

Jonathan Sacks

I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.

David Ebershoff

It was the transcendent fortitude and steadfastness of these men who in adversity and in suffering through the darkest hour of our history held faithful to an ideal. Here men endured that a nation might live.

Herbert Hoover

When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution... the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

Andrei Tarkovsky

[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

Samuel P. Huntington

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

George Orwell

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

E. L. Doctorow

The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary but convincing evidence.

James T. Shotwell

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

Dan Brown

A Quote by Abba Eban

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