“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”
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Thomas Sowell 101
American economist, social theorist, political philosopher … 1930Related quotes

“What we stint in materials we squander in lives... What you spare in money you spill in blood.”
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1915/dec/20/statement-by-mr-lloyd-george#column_97 in the House of Commons (20 December 1915)
Minister of Munitions
“The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”
As quoted in Road Signs for Success (1993) by Jim Whitt, p. 61.
1970s and later

“History is the biography of the human race.”
Other

Mankind is Confronted by One Supreme Task, News of the World, 14 November 1937
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 421.
The 1930s

As quoted in No Word for Time: The Way of the Algonquin People (2001) by Evan T. Pritchard

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
Context: We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them.