The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
“History, as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.”
Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter I, Part 1, The Shock of Events, p. 13
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Robert L. Heilbroner 39
American historian and economist 1919–2005Related quotes

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“The human capacity for denial and rationalization is always shocking, but never surprising.”
Humor in Psychotherapy (2007)

“I've come to believe that children live for the satisfaction of surprising their parents…”
Wilson Lewis, Chapter 2, p. 34
2000s, The Wedding (2003)

“For a person who lives 100 years in the future, the present comes as no surprise.”
Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives. An improvement in one's language abilities is therefore... observed in changes in one's purposes, perceptions, and evaluations. Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art. "Art," he said in Quintessence of Ibsenismn, "should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self knowledge, self-control, precision of action and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficialty and vulgarity." …For my purposes, if you replace the word "art" with the phrase "language education," you will have a precise statement of what I have been trying to say.

“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”
Former Vice President Convicted Of Treason, Sentenced To Death, AP News, en-US, 2018-07-09 https://www.apnews.com/984b27b0479c90a4cb47a13106ad8120,
Source: The Sand Pebbles (1962), Ch. 5; speech of Lt. Collins
Context: It is said there will be no more war. We must pretend to believe that. But when war comes, it is we who will take the first shock and buy time with our lives. It is we who keep the faith. We are not honored for it. We are called mercenaries on the outposts of empire. … We serve the flag. The trade we follow is the give and take of death. It is for that purpose the American people maintain us. Any one of us who believes he has a job like any other, for which he draws a money wage, is a thief of the food he eats and a trespasser in the bunk in which he lies down to sleep!