Quotes About History

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

If you're wondering what's wrong with Fenway Park in the first place, you're not the only one. Fenway is special precisely because it has what modern stadiums lack: seats that, while often cramped, offer the best views in baseball; and the sense that, if you squint, that could be Smoky Joe Wood pitching to Ty Cobb out there instead of Jeff Fassero and Bobby Higginson.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

One of the nice things about time, Crowley always said, was that it was steadily taking him further away from the fourteenth century.

Para comprender el estado de la humanidad puede que baste con saber que la mayoría de los grandes triunfos y grandes catástrofes de la historia no se deben a que las personas son buenas en esencia o malas en esencia, sino a que las personas son en esencia personas.

Marcel Proust wrote that "what we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us.

You may disagree. Personal history and national history do not always overlap, a point often overlooked in some of the broad strokes applied to the SG50 celebrations. But do consider your choices. In the age of Buzzfeed, we love lists. Make your own. No two lists will be the same, but collectively, they all say the same thing. They are all in search of a soul.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

What's the South African thing that I always mix up with "apathy"? (Thinks.) "Apartheid!" That wasn't me, so just get down off your high horse, okay?

I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of "crap.

We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years."4

Introduce an alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.

Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.

history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.

But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then?

Lincoln-Douglas debates may be described as expository

America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines "freedom," "truth," "intelligence," "fact," "wisdom," "memory," "history"—all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.

Theirs was a "language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.