Perspective Quotes - Page 9

The only people who really think they have seen something new are those whose experience is limited or whose vision can't penetrate beneath the surface of things. Because something is recent, they think it is new; they mistake now the for originality.

Espionage is the world's second oldest profession.

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

I suppose history always did have in it a large bit of the perspective of those who wrote it. People tend to make their own truth of what was right loom larger than other truths just as true but somehow less favorable to telling.

countries who have a longer past are better able see further forward into the future and think about extending the time period that they've already been around into the distant future.

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.

Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep it clean seabreeze of the centuries flowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the 20th century– the blindness about which posterity will ask,'but how COULD they have thought that?' lies where we have never suspected it.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

Resurrection hope turned those who believed it into a counter-empire, an alternative society that knew the worst that tyrants could do and knew that the true God had the answer.

There comes a time when something changes you... No matter the impact... Where the world no longer beats in time with you. You no longer feel amongst the fray.. And the feeling of loneliness is a brandished armor you wear the rest of your life.

My happiness with the future and the present depends on my ability to let the past go and make peace with it.

As I leave the garden
I take with me a renewed view,
And a quiet soul.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.