History Today

"We are caught in a situation in which every citizen of every country, his children, and his life's work, are threatened by the terrible insecurity which reigns in our world today. The process of technological development has not increased the stability and the welfare of humanity. Because of our inability to solve the problem of international organization, it has actually contributed to the dangers which threaten peace and the very existance of mankind"
Open Letter to U.N. Albert Einstein 1947.

"The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas."
Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd - 1896

"...what is real individualism in the contemporary secular state? If it is self gratification, then this is the golden age. If it has to do with personal public commitment, then we are witnessing the death of the individual and living in an age of unparalleled conformism. Specialization and professionalism ...have served to build defensive cells in which the individual is locked."
J. Ralston Saul - Voltaire's Bastards - 1993


"Groups tend to move toward a consensus, discouraging disagreement and often making poor decisions because people are afraid to disagree with what they think what their leaders want."
Irving Janis (1982) in Ten Questions by Joel M. Charon

"When we live as if the multiplicity of the phenomenal universe were the creator of all truths, and treat the world about us as if its shifting scale of values were the only measure of our ultimate good, the world becomes an illusion."
Thomas Merton - The Ascent to Truth - 1951


One day a man came to the teacher Bayazid and said: "I have fasted and prayed for thirty years and have found none of the spiritual joy of which you speak.""If you had fasted and prayed for three hundred years, you would never find it," answered the sage."How is that?" asked the man."Your selfishness is acting as a veil between you and God.""Tell me the cure.""It is a cure you cannot carry out," said Bayazid.Those around him pressed him to reveal it. After a time he spoke. "Go to the nearest barbershop and have your head shaved; strip yourself of your clothes except for a loincloth. Take a nosebag full of walnuts, hang it around your neck. Go into the market place and cry out-'Anybody who gives me a slab on the neck shall have a wallnut.' Then proceed to the law courts and do the same thing.""I cant do that," said the man, "suggest some other remedy.""This is the indespensable preliminary to a cure," answered Bayazid, "but as I told you, you are incurable."
al-Ghazzali 1964