We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.
But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.
The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, 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'.
It [the scientific revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. . . . It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.
Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.
It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.
My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip, my toes to numb to step, wait only for my boot heels to be wandering.
Honor's a good brooch to wear in a man's hat at all times.
We know that there are children out there whose parents do not take the kind of interest in their upbringing and in their existence that we would wish, but I don't think censorship is ever the solution to any problem, be it societal or be it the kind of information or ideas that you have access to.
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.