George Lucas Quotes

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

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

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

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

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

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 do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

What history is about is human beings.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

No single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present.

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

I read more history books than anything else.

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.