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Showing posts with the label “history of mankind”

Quote of the Week: How should History Be Taught?

History should be taught as the history of the rise of civilization, and not as the history of this nation or that. It should be taught from the point of view of mankind as a whole, and not with undue emphasis upon one’s own country.  Children should learn that every country has committed crimes and that most crimes were blunders. They should learn how mass hysteria can drive a whole nation into folly and into persecution of the few who are not swept away by the prevailing madness. They should be shown movies of foreign countries in which the children, though aliens, would be enjoying much the same pleasures, and suffering much the same sorrows, as those enjoyed and suffered by children at home. —Bertrand Russell, What Is Democracy? A Background Book, published by the Batchworth Press (1953), Reprinted and revised in Fact and Fiction (1961), pp. 78-110

Let it Be Known that we Knew Love

Although today there are almost 14000 known nuclear warheads - less than the 50000+ in 1986  - the ’colossal threat is still hanging over our heads’. “Three hundred and eighty million years passed between the appearance of visible life and the moment a butterfly learnt to fly... and then another 180 million years before nature produced a rose, with no other purpose than being beautiful. It took another four geological eras for human beings — unlike our Pithecanthropus great-grandparents — to learn to sing better than birds, and even be able to die of love. It is by no means glorious that men’s talents have ensured, in the golden age of science, that such a colossal, multi-millennial process could return to its original nothingness with the push of a button.” A beautiful depiction by one of the greatest modern novelists