Cy Twombly Quotes

I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

You must read history forward and not backward.

History shows you prospects by starlight, or at best by the waning moon.

The further backward we look, the further forward we are likely to see.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

Presidents look back seeking both inspiration for the future and sanction for the moment

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.