A Quote by Simon Schama
From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given them the power to challenge constituted authority. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by product of revolution, it was the source of energy.
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It sounds ghoulish, but it would have been fascinating to be in Paris in 1789 and watch the revolution begin. I can't even imagine what the energy must have been like that year with all of that change crackling in the air.
Between 1776 and 1789, Americans replaced a government over them with a government under them. They have worried ever since about keeping it under. Distrust of its powers has been more common and more visible than distrust of the imperial authority of England ever was before the Revolution.
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.
My final coaching point of the day: It's my contention that in any given moment one lives one's life in one of two ways, either under a threat or for a challenge. In performing when it counts, it's one or the other, under a threat or for a challenge. If, as Einstein says, "Imagination will take you everywhere," then living your life under a threat will take you nowhere.
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[Saddam Hussein] could have easily reconstituted a program. He was a threat to peace before we went in. He'd have been a threat to peace had we left him in power. Oftentimes history judges you on the decisions you make.
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi grabbed full power for himself. Not even the pharaohs had so much authority, to say nothing of his predecessor Hosni Mubarak. This is a catastrophe - it a mockery of the revolution that brought him to power and an act that leads one to fear the worst.
Old Testament Israel had some foundational pillars of faith. They were true and robust and God given. The trouble was that people had come to trust in them merely by repeating them, without paying any attention to the ethical implications of what their faith should mean in how they lived. They believed God had given them their land. He had. But they had not lived in it in either gratitude or obedience. They had not fulfilled any of the conditions that Deuteronomy had made so clear.
The entire force of the Conciliar revolt comes from the fact that it has apparently been imposed by the authority of the Church. How many bishops, priests, religious, and laymen, would have swallowed the lies of the heretics if they had not believed themselves bound to do so by the voice of Christ's Vicar on earth? Questioning the authority of these men renders their revolution of doubtful authenticity.
I wanted impossible things. I wanted my life with her before it all turned bad. What I had been given had been taken away and now I was even less than before.
Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
I exclusively attended public school... And I can honestly say that on the day of my graduation, if you had given me a pop quiz on history, science, or math, I would have in no way been able to pass it - despite the fact that I completely understood it at the time that it had been 'taught' to me, and had even made a good 'grade' on it.
When experts say nuclear power generation is safe and doesn't cost much and this is the only way to go if we want to stop relying on coal, well, we believe them. But they've been lying to us for years. And the point is, we've never really known anything about nuclear power generation. We had little interest in it before 3/11, and we certainly had no idea how difficult it is to control nuclear energy.
There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.
It seems that the rebels found the chaos of transition more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before. They joyfully welcomed back authority-even oppressive authority-for it was less painful for them than uncertainty.
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