#history

Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same. ↗

— Leah Hager Cohen

#museums #imagination

Toujours les même excellentes intentions qui pavent si bien l'enfer, l'enfer des camps de concentration. Léon Blum est un homme d'une intelligence raffinée, d'une grande culture, il aime Stendhal, il a sans doute lu et relu la Chartreuse de Parme; il lui manque cependant cette pointe de cynisme indispensable à la clairvoyance. On peut tout trouver dans les rangs de la social-démocratie, sauf des esprits véritablement libres. La doctrine est cependant souple, sujette à autant d'interprétations et modifications qu'on voudra; mais il n'est jamais bon d'avoir derrière soi une doctrine, surtout quand elle enferme le dogme du progrès, la confiance inébranble dans l'histoire et dans les masses. Marx n'est pas un bon auteur pour former le jugement; Machiavel vaut infiniment mieux. ↗

— Simone Weil

#intelligence

She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#clary-fray #history #jace-wayland #life #marks

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#history #literature #words #life

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history. ↗

— Thomas Howard

#earnestness #enough #forever #fright #hence

Better treatment and detection methods have also improved the survival rate for people with cancer, and for the first time in history, this year the absolute number of cancer deaths in the U.S. has decreased. ↗

— Ike Skelton

#also #better #cancer #deaths #decreased

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government. ↗

— John Sharp Williams

#bad government #convinces #government #grown #history

So what's the point of longing for a new, monumental category hidden somewhere in the non-Western discourse? On the contrary, shouldn't we emphasize that Western art historical thinking has not necessarily to be regarded as monumental? This would be a good condition for dialogue with scholars who are not (or do not want to be) affiliated with "our" tradition. ↗

— Ralph Ubl

#art

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. ↗

— Peter Weiss

#art #history #art

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about. ↗

— Mauricio Lasansky

#artists #dignity #history #human-nature #art