#history

Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself ↗

— Pierre Nora

#memory #prophecy #social-networks #imagination

The bloody times, the horror, will just be history to them, words on a page, so how will they dare to judge? Very easily, I should imagine. ↗

— Storm Constantine

#history #judgement #imagination

Make it easier for your citizens to be healthy and smart and they will save you in ways you have yet to imagine. Make it difficult and your nation will swirl history’s toilet on its way to hell. ↗

— Rob Delaney

#imagination

All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He’d prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#imagination

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined. ↗

— Hilary Mantel

#history #writing #imagination

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium. ↗

— Kevin Crossley-Holland

#language #poet #poetry #spoken #word

What is normal? Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#important #inspiration #life #normal #what-happened

if reason ruled the world would history even exist? ↗

— Ryszard Kapuściński

#intelligence #logic #reason #intelligence

And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#history #history-of-science #ideas #intelligent-playfulness #science

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#life