#tory

It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good. ↗

— Isaac Marion

#the-unknowable #effort

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#violence #war #violence

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. ↗

— Brandon Sanderson

#purpose

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#disney #future #history #past #relationships

The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance. ↗

— Napoleon Bonaparte

#regret #stupidity #victory #ignorance

Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.) ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#latin #ignorance

Ideology is the science of idiots. ↗

— John Adams

#john-adams #politics #science

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes. ↗

— Alan Moore

#history #anarchism

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchy #authority #ernst-jünger #history #anarchism

The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight. ↗

— Murray Bookchin

#history #truth #wikileaks #anarchism