The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion Quotes

“Toynbee’s wholesale dismissal of five centuries of Western art, eccentric and paradoxical as it is, raises fundamental issues about the character of human life itself. Man is a being who is aware of himself, and aware that his world is a mindaffected world. It is because his world is such that he is all at home in it. To say this is to say how vitally man depends on legacies and traditions, on the transmission of modes of thought and behaviour, on artefacts and institutions, without which he would be unable to survive, or at best become simply an animal or a savage. It is for this reason, among others, that man’s nature is his history.”
― Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion

“Divine purpose then cannot be fathomed; but also there can neither be discerned a pattern or meaning in the purposes of men, their actions and the consequences of these actions, nor can we see much congruence between what men desire and what in the end comes to pass.”
― Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion

“It is undoubtedly true that disagreeable and perhaps even potentially disastrous decisions have sometimes to be taken, because there is absolutely no alternative—because any conceivable alternative is manifestly worse. This was not the case here. As the Diaries indicate the decision was the outcome of a doctrinaire
conviction that overseas commitments are always both wrong and unprofitable, that money spent on defence is bread taken from the workers’ mouths and of a process of crude bargaining between Ministers in which the probable consequences of staying in, or leaving Aden and the Gulf, were the last thing to be considered”
― Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion