Famous quotes containing the words states, relations, historical and/or background:
“A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)