Time & Perspective Quote by Claude Vorilhon

History gets demoted here from civic scripture to a rap sheet. Claude Vorilhon, better known as Rael, isn’t offering a neutral critique of textbooks; he’s trying to break the spell that “the past” casts over the present. Calling history “glorious” is the oldest branding trick in politics: it launders conquest into heritage, cruelty into tradition, and leaves everyone feeling noble for inheriting someone else’s violence. By refusing the word, he yanks the emotional reward out of the story.

The phrasing is built to puncture reverence. “Our ancestors call history” frames the official narrative as an artifact of authority, not truth. It suggests that what gets canonized as History is already a choice: curated by winners, stamped by institutions, repeated until it feels inevitable. Then comes the pile-on: “mistakes, intolerances and violations.” The list escalates from the almost forgivable (“mistakes”) to the morally corrosive (“intolerances”) to the explicitly criminal (“violations”), a rhetorical move that denies the reader any comfortable middle ground. You can’t romanticize an error the way you can romanticize a war.

Context matters because Vorilhon’s celebrity is inseparable from his movement’s posture: anti-establishment, anti-traditional authority, suspicious of inherited narratives. This line functions as recruitment logic. If the past is a chain of abuses, then the “new” - new spirituality, new ethics, new origin stories - becomes not just appealing but necessary. The subtext isn’t only that history is ugly; it’s that deference to history is the mechanism that keeps ugliness repeating.