Quotes
Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them.
p. 94
You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. (p4)
‘Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.’
Each view has a history. You sense you're where others have been.
History is always lying before you, unnoticed: till you suddenly see it, as we do now.
As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw.
I’ve always been interested in foreign relations. It’s my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.
Life’s better, sounder, when we don’t brood unnecessarily on horrors. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
[W]hy study history? ...[It] is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history... to widen... horizons, to understand that our present... is... [not] inevitable, and that we... have many more possibilities before us...
We truly to think that the world doth even now be old; and this to have seemed a true thing unto every age that ever did live.
Don't you find it peculiar? The human conviction that we are the heirs of history instead of paragraphs that are almost over. A survival mechanism, no doubt.
