Orson Scott Card Quotes on History
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Was it something unavoidable, when strangers met, that the meeting had to be marked with blood?
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''Waterloo was won,'' quoted Rackham, ''on the playing fields of Eton.'' 'What the hell does that mean?' asked Carn Carby. 'You never even went to Eton.' 'It was an analogy,' said Rackham. 'If you hadn't spent your entire childhood playing war games, you'd actually know something. You're all so uneducated.'
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This is why so many knights have died. This is why troy fell, for a woman like this
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We were all victims of an oppressive system, but that mattered far less to us than our deep bonding with our owners
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God destroyed the world before. Once in a flood, when Noah rode it out in the ark. And once the tower of the worlds pride was destroyed in the confusion of tongues. The other times, if there were any other times, those times are all forgotten.
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His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life
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To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach
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It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent. But aren't all monstrous criminals innocent in their own eyes? Don't all their victims somehow deserve to die, in their imagination at least?
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No child can be understood without knowing the parents; no revolution can be understood without knowing the ancient regime; no colony can be understood without knowing the mother country; no new world can be understood without knowing the old world that went before.
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The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered. Atlantis
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War triggers human inventiveness at the most brilliant, because if you don't win your wars, your civilization disappears -Empire