Quotes About Relevance

Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than cover it. Instead of "teaching the book," teachers must develop a list of 30–50 topics they want to teach in their U.S. history course. Every topic should excite or at least interest them. What meaning might it have to students' lives?

The duty of the historian," Gordon Craig has reminded us, "is to restore to the past the options it once had." Craig also pointed out that this is an appropriate way to teach history and to make it memorable.

For that matter, even if the owners and workers in a historic site had not included a president, most visitors would want to hear about the important events in their lives, not just about their furniture.

She wishes there were only dead authors. Living ones are beneath her attention.

today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip wrappers

I was twenty-one: all around me our dining companions were in their forties and fifties, if not their sixties and seventies. It was as if we had been propelled into a geriatric culture where our generation was deliberately snubbed as irrelevant.

If you didn't have anything truly great to offer, something truly amazing, then you should just shut the fuck up.

I would not be happy to do what I do unless I felt that the large audience wanted it.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

If you think about it, critics are an unnecessary life-form on the planet Earth, and here's why: because it's a job without credentials. You don't have to go to school.

I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary.

The architect works for so many years building it, and the moment you deliver it to the people is the moment when you are unnecessary.

Dr. King was unpopular while he was alive - he's only popular now because he's dead and not a threat to anyone.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

Values unrelated to modern reality are not just electorally hopeless, the values themselves become devalued. They have no purchase on the real world.

I never mean to make a headline where it's like, 'Chris Long unsure.' I never try to make it sound like I'm under the impression it matters either way if I play or anybody cares.

I never want to be one of those artists who feels untouchable and extraordinary. I have to be genuine.

I would love to bring it up-to-date and get some more people interested in snooker.

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

We don't want to upset our fans, because that's not what we are here to do.

'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for.

Plays which are universal tempt me. 'August: Osage County' is a play which is relevant to the urban Indian set up.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.