"And at last I had come to believe that, although men did change slowly, and left the evidence of their progressive modifications in statutes and treaties, no change would come soon enough to save the next generation from the grief and ruin that had engulfed my own so long as the world I knew endured - the world of haves and have-nots; of owners and owned; of rich and poor; of Great Powers and little nations, always at the mercy of the wealthy and strong; of influential persons whose interests were served by war, and who had sufficient authority to compel politicians to precipitate on behalf of a few the wholesale destruction of millions."
Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, 1933
About Me
- CyberKitten
- I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.
6 comments:
Well isn't she just a ray of sunshine! ;-)
[LOL] Well, she had a pretty hard life - all things considered....
my boss used to say: "the more things change the more they stay the same..."
The underlying themes of history stay the same because people are essentially the same throughout human history. The only way that history in the future will be greatly different is if we change who we are - of course then it'll no longer be human history. It's quite a paradox.
That is a great quotation. It is very appropriate for the time that it is written.
Not so long ago I would have argued that there is hope that humanity is getting past a lot of this bad stuff. I still think that may be true, but I am less optimistic as of late.
I'm afraid that I've read far too much history to have much faith in mankind as a whole. I have met and known many good people but it seems that as a mass, as a species, we have little going for us. It seems, at least to me, that our good points are more than compensated for by our bad points. But that could be just because I'm getting old... [grin]
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