Amy

“I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.”360”
― Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“In the near term, such compromises made possible a continental union of North and South that provided bountiful benefits to freeborn Americans. But in the long run, the Founders’ failure to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction would lead to massive military conflict on American soil—the very sort of conflict whose avoidance was, as we shall now see, literally the primary purpose of the Constitution of 1788.”
― Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography

“So while the past is always implicit in the present, interpretation of the past varies with succeeding generations. The present meanings of the past evolve to reflect the concerns of each living generation. Thus although the meanings of specific events of the past may have had one set of meanings for the generation in the decades after the American Revolution, those same events may have very different meanings now.”
― Robert R. Archibald, A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community

“In conclusion,” he said, “one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.” To fail to learn from such “blunders of the past,” he said, was to end up on a course toward “another war and chaos.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin