Present Perspective Quotes

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.

If the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.

We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.