Quotes About Context

The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.

My Open record is not particularly good if you look at it on paper. But at the same time I don't feel like it is as bad as the black and white suggests.

You bowl according to situations - whether at the death or at the beginning.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

Even great actors shine brighter in the right atmosphere.

Brilliant documentaries are about so much more than their subject.

People don't look at the broader picture a lot of the time.

I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.

You aren't going to be successful as a diplomat if you don't understand the strategic context in which you are actually negotiating. It is not deal making. It's not.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

My family didn't film anything. But then you look deeper and realize, maybe there are photographs, there are things. It's also context: You give something a context, and suddenly it becomes really deep or meaningful footage.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.

Football was always a deal we made with ourselves. We adopted it for its brutality, which was embedded in a context that happened to be perfectly suited to television and to gambling, but which we could convince ourselves was only incidental to our enjoyment because it was only incidental to the game itself.

It's too easy to sum up a person's character in one negative instant, and it doesn't put anything good out into the world.

I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.

The responsibility and the blessing in many ways of a Sunday show is being able to step back and give context.

What people want on a Sunday morning is not to be in the breaking news fray. They want someone to call hits and misses, and to bring context and perspective and to be even-handed.

The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.

No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

It is a very good exercise, at least from a historian's point of view, to imagine oneself a devout pagan while reading various Christian writings.

A knowledge and appreciation of history is difficult for a culture so enthralled by the moment, a culture that shuns the discipline of a larger context in any study. Unfortunately this loss of historical interest has made the present difficult to address because the context of the past is imperative if we are to salvage the future.