#history

I'm a history nut. ↗

— Billy Joel

#i #nut

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! ↗

— Charles Darwin

#natural-history #physicalism #experience

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ↗

— George Santayana

#lesson #life #past #repeat #life

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life. ↗

— Amy Tan

#mystery #life

Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread. ↗

— Janet Wallach

#history #writers #life

Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package. ↗

— Robert Kanigel

#computer-algebra-system #history #math #ramanujan #life

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#history #life #literature #time #life

I have seen ministers of justice, clothed in magisterial robes and criminals arraigned before them, while life was suspended on a breath in the courts of England; I have witnessed a congress in solemn session to give laws to nations;...but dignity and majesty have I seen but once, as it stood in chains at midnight, in a dungeon, in an obscure village of Missouri. ↗

— Parley P. Pratt

#orsen-f-whitney #life

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#history #ignorance #ignorance

The world is round. ↗

— Christopher Columbus

#science