Quotes About Predecessors

It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

Assimilating the style of predecessors is necessary before one can develop one's own. Only by immersing oneself in the domain can one find out whether there is room left for contributing creatively to it, and whether one is capable of doing so.

As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.

We must be constantly aware of our responsibility in the Communion of Saints, without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an "alternatvie source," independent of scripture itself. When they speak with one voice, we should listen very carefully. They may be wrong. They sometimes are. But we ignore them at our peril.

Not only was the theory of evolution not invented by Darwin himself; it wasn't invented by his Enlightenment predecessors either. It was invented by Epicurus (looking back to Democritus and others) and popularized by Lucretius.

Like most of my predecessors, I have hunted the unicorn chiefly in libraries, realizing the delightful absurdity of the task quite as fully as any one could point it out to me.

Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don't simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake here and there the intellectual scaffolding surrounding our predecessors' work, in the full, ironic knowledge that someone else is going to come along and give the scaffolding surrounding our own work a good shake, too, that no historian, in short, is ever permitted the final word.

Theirs was the largest class in Princeton history and, while homogenous by later standards, it was more diverse than many of its predecessors, with the largest share of public high school students (37 percent)