The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.
There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.
It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.
Of course, I believe that Mike Piazza is probably the greatest offensive catcher in the history of baseball, only got over 50%. Johnny Bench is the best catcher in the history of baseball, but Piazza has all the record for catchers as far as offensiv...
She probably thought I was making a dumb joke, but sometimes history sounded like a dumb joke. History was either a dumb joke or a cruel joke.
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.
At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.
There are long stretches of the work [Paradise Lost] that are for anyone not theologically minded sheer howling boredom from the point of view of the content.
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.
Europeans would like to escape from their history, a "great" history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to it.
History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
Submitting to history allows us to remember our society’s past. Although writing and art express history, it's our humanity which keeps all of us striving for an improved future.
When you don't change, history repeats itself. Then you have to decide if changing is for the best, or you keep seeing repeats because you're doing something right.
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to h...
