Quotes About Events

History is not good news or bad news, it's just one big story unreeling. There are no small parts, only small actors.

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

Scholars have long recognized that Luke himself wrote these speeches—they are not the speeches that these apostles really delivered at one time or another. Luke is writing decades after the events he narrates, and no one at the time was taking notes.

Making these "predictions" of the future was relatively easy when the real author was living after the events he "predicted.

The author of Acts, who has put these words on Peter's lips, sees that everything—even the disastrous events of Jesus' betrayal and execution—was according to plan.

What is remarkable about the discussion on October 29, 1963, is that a broad array of top officials voiced doubts about the coup, including JFK himself, without any actual effect on the course of events

Julie had always believed that even if it's the big, unexpected events (good and bad) that make life memorable and occasionally exciting, it's the small, predictable routines that hold life together and make it worth living.

Mus skaudina ne skaud?s ?vykiai, bet m?s? reakcija ? tuos ?vykius.

The mind is] simply thus, the fabric of the world itself – the ongoing arising and falling away that are matter, energy, and events.

If you occasionally wonder how I know about some of the events I describe in this book, I don't. I have found that--just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.

Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.

Tras los recientes acontecimientos, uno se pregunta si la macroeconomía es la especialidad de algún economista.

After recent events, one might wonder if the macroeconomy is the domain of any economist.

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

events that occur at random will seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to space them out.

As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

The application of reason revealed that reports of miracles were dubious, that the authors of holy books were all too human, that natural events unfolded with no regard to human welfare, and that different cultures believed in mutually incompatible deities, none of them less likely than the others to be products of the imagination. (As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.")

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.

A bit less obvious is the metaphor for human history, course, which refers to a path of running or flowing, as in the course of a river, a racecourse, and a headlong course. The metaphor is that A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IS MOTION ALONG A PATHWAY, a special case of the TIME IS MOTION metaphor we met in the previous chapter.

Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us. We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds.

Concepts of space seem to infect other concepts as well, as we saw in the first chapter when noting the way that people count and measure out events as if they were objects made of time-stuff. People also use space as a model for an abstract continuum when they speak of the rising or falling of their paycheck, their weight, or their spirits,38 or when they plot data points, representing anything whatsoever, on graph paper.

When we agglomerate events through the wide-angle lens of history, which sees only the acts of influential leaders, a causative verb will cut the chain at the link immediately connected to the outcome.

I love going out. I love partying.