Quotes About History

have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swan events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.

10 year old books feel very aged, out of place, out of sync. 200 year old books feel contemporary. 2000 year old books feel fresh.

the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality);

Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst, we don't know how long they'll last.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.fn3

On alternative histories, a probabilistic view of the world, intellectual fraud, and the randomness wisdom of a Frenchman with steady bathing habits. How journalists are bred to not understand random series of events.

The Discovery of France

In the end we are being driven by history, all the while thinking that we are doing the driving.

The need to focus on the payoff from your actions instead of studying the structure of the world (or understanding the "True" and the "False") has been largely missed in intellectual history.

Esse é o argumento que David Hume, em sua História da Inglaterra,5 apresenta em favor dos pequenos Estados, já que os grandes cedem à sedução da guerra.

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

Frédéric Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshott, John Gray, Ammianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadia Gaon, or Joseph de Maistre; he

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.

You've got nothing that lasts, you know. That's not the first town that ever stood there. There was one before that, and one before that, and one before that one, on back for 900 years. But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy?

I have two goals. First, that readers be interested, drawn by a historical account, amused by its comic aspects, saddened by the tragic elements, captured by the possibilities of the past; and second, that readers be aware that there could be another way of looking at things besides the one I offer. I'm not giving a lesson or a sermon, I'm offering a dialogue, as I said before.

what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

Memory knows before knowing remembers," William Faulkner wrote.

I returned to a field of cotton, hallowed ground — as slave legend goes — each boll holding the ghosts of generations: those who measured their days by the heft of sacks and lengths of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants still sewn into our clothes.

The yoke of my birth

the dark foil in this American story

And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it necessarily be akin to the mortal frame where with, for a little while, I walk the streets

So far as we can ascertain, in primitive cultures the idea of romantic love did not exist at all.