The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: tha...
I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you rea...
Relationships are like Rome -- difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the 'golden age', and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom ...
[A dog is] a bundle of pure love, gift-wrapped in fur.
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium exper...
In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ag...
Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Acti...
The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transfo...
In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, ...
Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t t...
I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficie...
If one man praises you, a thousand will repeat the praise.
What children hear their parents say by the fireside, they repeat in the highway.
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been ...
The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so...
Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . ...
History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.
History, the way the teachers liked it, was a racetrack, a straight shot from start to finish line; life itself was more of a maze.
A false-statement requires deceit and distortion for someone to buy it, but a truthful-statement sells itself.
This is an exciting time. I believe we stand at the edge of a new age - a Golden Age - of freedom that will rival any of the great eras of world history because it will be the entire world itself that is changing.
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...