As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

Many [totalitarians] have ruled behind a religious front. It makes the creation of heretics that much easier.

History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again.