“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.”

“Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks — already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.”

“History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma”

“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”

“„Hitler´s dictatorship“, he said, „differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical developement, a dicttorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man....Earlier dictators needed highly qualified assistants even at the lowest level – men who could think and act independently. The totalirian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with such men; thanks to modern methods of communication, i tis possible to mechanize the lower leadership. As a result of this there has arisen the new type of uncritical recipient of orders.“ (Albert Speer)”