Quotes
My skepticism concerning all notions of reconquista is skepticism toward the view that history is restorative. I get older but I do not grow wiser. It is only by shedding skin, by turning pages, by ordering stronger spectacles, by having my hair cut, that I seem to be restoring myself to a circular pattern, that I seem to progress toward youth and capability, though my progress is actually a decline.
Anyone who is of a thoughtful, philisophical cast of mind will occasionaly be struck by the appearance of certain organizing principles of history. The forms these principles seem to take inevitably depends upon one's specific obsession. For a mornachist, history is a struggle of classes of economic civil war. An agriculturalist sees the dynamic of populations, land, and availability of food; a philosopher might speak of the will to power or the will to sythesis; a theologian of the will of God.
p. 100
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Chamberlain's stubborn, fanatical insistence on giving Hitler what he wanted, his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg and finally the fateful journey to Munich rescued Hitler from his limb and strengthened his position in Europe, in Germany, in the Army, beyond anything that could have been imagined a few weeks before. It also added immeasurably to the power of the Third Reich vis-à-vis the Western democracies and the Soviet Union.
History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
p. 349
The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.
The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others.
If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.
In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!
France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed the system, and succeeded.
