Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society, and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

History is a great dust heap.

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

Past art is subject to change.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians.

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.