Revisionism Quotes

Perpetual war for perpetual peace ~ Charles A. Beard

Dogma is less useful than cow dung. One can make whatever one likes out of it, even revisionism ... ~ Mao Zedong

Bush's presidency is revisionism-proof. We're going to be recovering from it for the rest of our lives. ~ Michael Moore

As with any detailed eyewitness testimonies after so many years, Eichmann's various accounts differ from one another and are not free of puzzling contradictions with other evidence.

-- The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), page 363. ~ Christopher R. Browning

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. ~ Marge Piercy

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history. ~ Antonia Fraser

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. ~ Harold Bloom

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Yet many people simply cannot accept this. They keep bringing up red herring after red herring to avoid finally admitting "YES, it happened exactly as the history books say, end of story." Which, of course, is the only correct response to the question anti-Semites raise about whether or not this historically and forensically-proven Nazi genocide even happened. ~ James Morcan

It's irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. I've lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you're dead. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

In telling these stories of our Nation's past, however, let's not be so zealous in correcting liberal historians that we create our own historical revisionism. If the Founding Fathers were alive today, some of them would not want to go to the typical Evangelical church. Some were influenced by the pagan Enlightenment, as well as the Protestant Reformation. one historical figure (not a Founding Father) who's been misrepresented in our quest to find Christian heroes is Johnny Appleseed. He's routinely pictured as a nice man who went around scattering apple seeds everywhere and toting a Bible under his arm. The fact is, Johnny Appleseed was a missionary for Swedenbogrism, a spiritist cult. This cult taught many false doctrines and claimed that the writings of the Apostle Paul had no place in the Bible. When a child hears that Johnny Appleseed is a 'godly hero' and then discovers that he was in fact a cult member, what will he logically conclude about everything he's been taught? ~ Gregg Harris

If they had kept quiet, and lain low for a time, things might have fizzled out as another unreal Wortstreist, blown up by a few ambitious authors of the party press. As it was, they decided to counter-attack the noisy, irrepressible outsiders--foreigners, to boot--and so forced a reluctant leadership to turn its full, slow, wrath against them; and against Bernstein too. For the most practical manifestation of revisionism was indiscipline and disobedience, a door opened to centrifugal forces of bourgeois influence. ~ John Peter Nettl

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus's words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves. ~ Reza Aslan

Often it is those who are most critical of a "Eurocentric" view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race. ~ Thomas Sowell

Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad. ~ A.E. Samaan

Never forget" is the collective plea of Holocaust survivors. And in the first few decades after WW2 ended, it really did seem as if humanity would always remember, and perhaps even learn from, the Nazi genocide so that future atrocities may be prevented. Unfortunately, the historicity of the Holocaust has been undermined and chipped away at by the exact same sinister forces that created the genocide in the first place: racists, religious bigots and the most paranoid type of conspiracy theorists who, together, are uniting – often unwittingly – to form a new wave of anti-Semitism that will not willingly accept the obvious facts of the past. This chipping away (at the truth) began slowly and insidiously – much like the Holocaust itself – but sadly, and worryingly, it is gathering pace. ~ James Morcan

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism. ~ Karen Abbott

The lonely, wistful revisionism of memories is as gratingly repetitive as snow and ice in Canada. I avoid them both at all costs - memories and Canada. ~ Brian D'Ambrosio

The various Eichmann testimonies are truly staggering in their total volume. But how, if at all, can they be used? Even more than most memoirs, the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically perpetrator testimony as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise.
-- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 8-9. ~ Christopher R. Browning