John Smith Quotes

History is not intelligible without geography.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

The context of history proved invaluable.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

If geography is prose, maps are iconography.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

I loved math and science. It just made sense to me. But my hatred for world history has come to bite me in the butt in my adult years. Every show I have done professionally has required me to study the world in which my characters lived.

The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.

I love history, doesn't matter what era, I'm fascinated.

GIS is the only technology that actually integrates many different subjects using geography as its common framework.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

Geography is everywhere

You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulae exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

History is a never ending argument.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.