All Quotes By Tag: History

“There comes a moment in history when ignorance is no longer a forgivable offense… a moment when only wisdom has the power to absolve. – Bertrand Zobrist”

“…the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can’t see through it–nor can they.”

“There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.”

“Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.”

“[Dialogue between Solon and an Egyptian Priest]In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais […] To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called “the first man,” and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age.”

“Going down in history is a dead end pursuit”

“Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.”

“How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.”

“Learn from your history, but don’t live in it.”

“Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.”

“The Master said, “A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.”(Analects 2.11)”

“He who doesn’t understand history is doomed to repeat it.”

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”

“Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.”