The great age is now, and has nearly always been now.
Remembering
The obscurest epoch is today.
—Stevenson
The first time is the farce: the repetition is the tragedy.
Professing communism never saved a kulak, and professing Nazism never saved a Jew. Only the religious fanatics are that sporting.
Pas d’ennemi à gauche eventually begets pas d’ennemi à droite.
At the beginning you go to the gulag for criticizing Stalin; toward the end for being first, when his name is mentioned, to stop applauding.
It is the lies we tell about history that we are most apt to remember.
In lieu of explanation history offers only more detail.
Nazism is worse than Bolshevism, because everybody’s sober.
It is humble to side with science, and abject to side with history.
History is best read with a grand theory in mind. It will surely be false, but facts and incidents will cling to it like lint.