Carl Lotus Becker

“All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.”

“Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.”

“We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.”

“Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.”

“Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.”

“Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.”

“Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.”