Quotes About Analysis

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Nobody would ever take the time to analyze forensic evidence in the theft of frozen Jimmy Dean sausages from an office break room.

But McNamara knew more than the actual facts—he also knew the hypothetical ones. When you talked with him, you realized that he had already played out in his head the relevant details for every conceivable option and scenario.

Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

I tend not to analyse my work, though I'm frequently intrigued when other people take time to do so.

Philosophy, like science, consists of theories or insights arrived at as a result of systemic reflection or reasoning in regard to the data of experience. It involves, therefore, the analysis of experience and the synthesis of the results of analysis into a comprehensive or unitary conception. Philosophy seeks a totality and harmony of reasoned insight into the nature and meaning of all the principal aspects of reality.

reread favourite books as if you are taking apart a clock

resemble a lab assistant.

we are trying to check out. The picture may be vague, or it may be very precise. Either way, every fresh result is something to be thought about and incorporated, either as reinforcement or as a step in a new direction. As more results come in the excitement builds, reaching a peak when quick calculations show that the results are going according to plan.

Studies show American students are becoming less proficient in math. Experts say we should have seen this coming, but nobody could put 2 and 2 together.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

But to be the best, to reach the pinnacle, requires self-denial, sacrifice, discipline, humility, and preparation. You have to hurt yourself, scold yourself, analyze yourself, recognize your weaknesses at the same time you try to eliminate them.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

With the Great Detective to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.

Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn't be true of Shakespeare's character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun.

With Malone's decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon.

Bacon wanted to reach a similar conclusion without doing the painstaking philological analysis at the heart of this critical endeavour. She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate, that Shakespeare was as much a myth as Homer or Jesus.

It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant.

Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the next chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, "In all history, there is no known case of anyone's creating a problem for anyone else.

Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life. Even

History is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.

Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.