A Quote by Pieter Geyl
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.
Related Quotes
It is a hugely embarrassing situation to find myself in, I'm a professional driver and to be caught speeding and to have my licence taken away for speeding, it would have an effect on my reputation.
Well, one of the things I should tell you is that if you look at the very long sweep of history what you see is that the rate of growth has been speeding up, the rate of progress, and that's because there's more and more people who are all engaged in this process of discovery.
The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.
Happiness has to do with how quickly you vibrate. Meditation is a process of speeding up the vibration.
Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
When I was growing up reading history books as a young student, it seemed all wars had a winner. Yet in today's wars, it is increasingly clear that no one wins. Everyone loses.
In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
The wars of Israel were the only 'holy wars' in history... there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.
I went out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally [in Buzzing at the Sill] because I was interested in war as a notion and in experiencing it. I was interested in history and how societies form. I was interested in the recent history of what had provoked these wars. So when I finally got out there, I was really seeing the wars through the American perspective, much more than through being embedded with American soldiers and Marines.
You get a lot of speeding tickets, and you say, 'I'm so unlucky!' No, you're not. You're speeding. Slow down.
It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.
All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.
History shows that wars are divided into two kinds-just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust.
Simon Bolivar, when history led him - and as Karl Marx said, men can make history, but only as far as history allows us to do so - when history took Bolivar and made him the leader of the independence process in Venezuela, he made that process revolutionary.
I think you can go back in history and look at what the effect in Asia and the world was of a divided, fractured China from, you know, the opium wars through the Chinese civil war, and I don't think it was pretty for Asia or the world.
The people [in the USA] are not very well informed. They certainly don`t know history. They certainly are not interested in foreign affairs very much, unless it comes right to their doorstep. They all learn history through wars. They learn geography through wars.
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