Puppycow
Penultimate Amazing
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He who does not know history is doomed to repeat its mistakes.
- Thread starter Leumas
- Start date
Bill Thompson
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- if you know history what would you think of the historic irony of a Mormon running for president of the United States?
- if you know history what would you think Lincoln would think of a Mormon running for president of the United States?
- if you know history what would you think of the historic irony of a Mormon running for president against a black man?
They don't all need to come from the same speech in order to be FDR quotes. But (as Brainster already noted) they do need to all come from the same speech in order for the OP to be honest.
In the OP Leumas claimed to be presenting quotes from FDR. But -- as I suspected -- Leumas did not get these quotes from reading or listening to FDR. Nor, apparently, did Leumas take the time to look up and read FDR's speeches or writings before trying to pass this stuff on to others.
Leumas implied a familiarity with the words of FDR which Leumas did not actually have. I think that's something skeptics should try to avoid doing. If one doesn't know what one is talking about, one shouldn't pretend one does.
If one hasn't actually read FDR's speech, and is getting excerpts from a third party, one should state that clearly. For instance:
an imaginary but honest version of the thread-starter said:
angrysoba
Philosophile
angrysoba
Philosophile
Then surely the best thing to say in that case is "in history everything happens as a result of human agency". Not as pithy, perhaps, but not quite as wrong as saying nothing happens by accident. Yet still glaringly wrong.
After all, the Irish Potato Famine didn't occur by human agency. Not really unless you want to say that growing potatoes in the first place was what led to the potato famine. The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake was not, as far as I know, due to human agency (though some blamed the Koreans, naturally). If you still want to claim there was human agency in having a city built there in the first place, then how about the last Ice Age. Really, nothing could be said about that to be due to human agency except possibly the effects it had on humans who happened to exist at the time.
I was going to give FDR a big fail for this until it turned out to be something made up.
I remember on some conspiracy site somebody had posted parts of Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech and filled in parts of the speech with his own embellishments about Israel, Mossad, MI6 etc... and all kinds of things that Kennedy wasn't talking about at all. When I challenged him, he weirdly insisted that he had listened to the speech and transcribed everything JFK had said. It didn't matter that I could link to an actual transcription of the speech itself, he liked his own version much better.
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leftysergeant
Penultimate Amazing
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The schools need to teach more history, preferably from pre-Goals 2000 and non-Texas-approved text books.
What they teach today is too full of gaps. Few people ever hear a bit of the history of labor unions or the New Deal.
I think this is deliberate, rather than accidental. Some of the major re-alignments of educational policies over the last thirty yearts have been the work of republicons who do not want people to fully understnd FDR's place in history.
(The effort to replace his portrait on the dime is just a reflection of that idea.)
What they teach today is too full of gaps. Few people ever hear a bit of the history of labor unions or the New Deal.
I think this is deliberate, rather than accidental. Some of the major re-alignments of educational policies over the last thirty yearts have been the work of republicons who do not want people to fully understnd FDR's place in history.
(The effort to replace his portrait on the dime is just a reflection of that idea.)
Brainster
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What a great country this is. The evangelicals are hoping that a born Catholic (Santorum) or a converted Catholic (Gingrich) will save them from a Mormon.
All the quotes are listed in (except for the very first one)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
and
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
I apologize about the quote
As DDT has correctly stated it is a misquotation. I apologize for not having checked it before posting. Thank you DDT for the correction
So please disregard that quote. However all the other quotes are correctly reproduced in the above two links given.
I did make one other mistake.... I mistakenly attributed all the Roosevelt quotes to his speech to the congress in 1938. That is not the case. Only the following is from that speech. The others are from two other speeches.
So please excuse the faux pas.
I also intentionally rephrased the "He who does not know history" phrase. I did not say it was a quote. I put it in my own words for extra emphasis.
My intention in the post is to provoke discussion and thought about the state of our affairs today in light of the quotes.
So please go ahead.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
and
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
I apologize about the quote
“In history, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet someone planned it”
As DDT has correctly stated it is a misquotation. I apologize for not having checked it before posting. Thank you DDT for the correction
So please disregard that quote. However all the other quotes are correctly reproduced in the above two links given.
I did make one other mistake.... I mistakenly attributed all the Roosevelt quotes to his speech to the congress in 1938. That is not the case. Only the following is from that speech. The others are from two other speeches.
So please excuse the faux pas.
I also intentionally rephrased the "He who does not know history" phrase. I did not say it was a quote. I put it in my own words for extra emphasis.
My intention in the post is to provoke discussion and thought about the state of our affairs today in light of the quotes.
So please go ahead.
aggle-rithm
Ardent Formulist
I agree that leaders must be aware of history, but they should also recognize that today's circumstances don't necessarily apply to the lessons history has taught us.
leftysergeant
Penultimate Amazing
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For the most part, what FDR addressed in the passages quoted is spot-on in assessing what is wrong in America today.
The dog collar that FDR placed on the financial sector was taken off in the 1980s and all the wealth and the political power once held by the people at large have been funneled upward into the hands of the ecconomic royalists whom FDR so vigorously fought against. What he said in those three speeches applies fully to what is happening to us today.
For a fuller picture of what went wrong, see Eisenhower's MIC speech.
And you did. Those quotes brought to mind the sad state of affairs we have when so many people do not bother actually learning history.
It's apparent from your post you did not get the Roosevelt quotes from reading Roosevelt's speeches. Who you got them from I don't know, as you still haven't mentioned the actual source from which you copied and pasted them. But whoever selected those particular items out of Roosevelt's speeches -- or what that person thought were Roosevelt's speeches -- is the person you have studied and the person who has inspired you to start this thread.
If you want to learn what Franklin D. Roosevelt thought, and to discuss those thoughts productively with others, you should first go and familiarize yourself with Roosevelt.
One way to do that is to read a good biography -- one which is well-researched enough that it doesn't attribute to Roosevelt things he never said. Another good way is to look up some of his speeches and read them for yourself. Yet another way, if you're really interested in learning history and have the time, is to go to agood library and browse through microfilm of newspaper stories and magazine articles from FDR's time.
Putting forward so many quotes all at once, none of which you seem to be familiar enough with to provide any useful commentary on in your OP, is not a good way to start a discussion. Instead, why don't you pick out one which strikes you as especially interesting and worth discussing. Go look up the speech it appears in. Read the speech for yourself, trying to understand the issues and events FDR was speaking about and trying to understand the points he was making. If what he is talking about is unfamiliar to you, look up some newspaper stories or magazine articles from the time that deal with those issues and events so you can understand the background to the speech. When you understand what the quoted passage is about, then start a thread to discuss it.
Doing it that way, rather than the way you did, is better for several reasons. First, you will be able to write a better OP -- one that is more informative, and one that is more likely to attract people, than the wall of text you posted. Second, you will be better able to take part in the discussion yourself. And third, you will be setting a good example of the key point you seem to be making in your thread title: that it is good for people to learn history.
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[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_512824ef5162a06a0d.jpg[/qimg]
I hope that is your reaction to the irony of a thread on the importance of knowing history being started by someone who exemplifies the problem.
But in case it's not, let's try again.
1. Which speeches of FDR had you read in their entirety prior to starting this thread?
2. Which (if any) biographies of FDR had you read prior to starting this thread?
3. What are the main sources which have contributed to your knowledge of FDR? Which of these would you recommend to others interested in learning about FDR as good sources of information?
4. It appears to me you copied and pasted the quotes in the OP from somewhere. Obviously it wasn't from an actual speech by FDR, since the first "quotation" is not from FDR. It wasn't from any reputable biography (or biographical website) of FDR, since a reputable biography wouldn't have included a spurious quotation as if it were genuine. So what was your actual source for the material you copied into the OP?
I hope that is your reaction to the irony of a thread on the importance of knowing history being started by someone who exemplifies the problem.
But in case it's not, let's try again.
1. Which speeches of FDR had you read in their entirety prior to starting this thread?
2. Which (if any) biographies of FDR had you read prior to starting this thread?
3. What are the main sources which have contributed to your knowledge of FDR? Which of these would you recommend to others interested in learning about FDR as good sources of information?
4. It appears to me you copied and pasted the quotes in the OP from somewhere. Obviously it wasn't from an actual speech by FDR, since the first "quotation" is not from FDR. It wasn't from any reputable biography (or biographical website) of FDR, since a reputable biography wouldn't have included a spurious quotation as if it were genuine. So what was your actual source for the material you copied into the OP?
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That is an interesting CONSPIRACY you are THEORIZING here!
So...in this conspiracy theory of yours....what nefarious objectives do I have and who are these people you theorize are conspiring with me?
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No.... it is a comment on how you are trying your darnest to derail this thread with your conspiracy theories.
Your attempts are obvious and pathetic.
No, not a conspiracy theory. It's a simple statement of a rather obvious fact -- one which I note you have not denied.
Again: it is impossible for you have gotten the line you quoted, "In history, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet someone planned it", from an FDR speech because he never said that.
Obviously you got it from somewhere -- just not from where you implied in the OP that you had gotten it.
And that's a big problem nowadays, one which is very relevant to this thread. The title of the thread is "He who does not know history is doomed to repeat its mistakes," and that's what my posts are about.
We have an OP written by someone trying to talk about passages from FDR's speeches -- but instead of actually looking up and reading FDR's speeches as a foundation for that discussion, goes to some source which is equally ignorant of FDR's actual speeches and which passes off a spurious quote as if it were genuine.
Normally pointing out this kind of failing at length would be thread drift. But in this particular case, it seems to me an extremely pertinent example.
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A conspiracy of one!? (laughing dogs etc go here)
A Laughing Baby
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Just go ahead and say "Vote Ron Paul" and let's get down to the meat and potatoes of it.
ETA: Also, the irony of someone titling a thread "He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it," then immediately putting "Franklind" as the first name of FDR is not lost on me.
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