Historical Relevance Quotes

Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.

I'm not begging to be remembered or whatever. I did my thing, and if you remember, that's even better. But if you don't, there's so many other things going on.

The past is a present force.

The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

By the next century communism's irreversible historical decline will have made its practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human condition.

Why do we not celebrate the 4th of July? The Declaration of Independence is just as precious to me today as it was twenty years ago! Has it not the same validity that it had in 1776?

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

It's hard to say what the Founding Fathers would think of the modern presidency.

Art is forever.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

Today, the world is so small and so interdependent that the concept of war has become anachronistic, an outmoded approach. As a rule, we always talk about reform and changes. Among the old traditions, there are many aspects that are either ill-suited to our present reality or are counterproductive due to their shortsightedness. These, we have consigned to the dustbin of history. War too should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.

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

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

I may be a descendant of Seth. I say to myself, What does [the story of Cain and Abel] teach me? So I go back to all the interpretations in the Talmud, which to me are a source of pleasure and joy. Then I say, maybe this story is not for then; maybe it's for now! It's possible for brothers to kill one another in civil wars. But most important, whoever kills, kills his brother. That's a moral conclusion that may not be there; but that must be my conclusion. Otherwise, why read it? Whoever kills, kills his brother.

Monuments obtain their full worth through their complete use.

The past is ignorant of the present. Be careful in taking its advice.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.