Edward Sapir Quotes

I knew I never wanted to become an archaeologist. But at school I became intrigued by what people were doing on an everyday basis in the past.

You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

By looking into more details of American history, we can make more sense of what's happening today.

It's more interesting because you get to research the history of the period, and all the different aesthetic elements that make a film, particularly this film, so stunning.

We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

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

I like historical things; I like researching things.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

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

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

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.

Americans’ manner of viewing foreign adversaries today is rooted in the history of their country’s past relations with the outside world. Their attitudes have been shaped especially by the most costly and all-consuming episodes in that history, in particular the wars—hot and cold—of the 20th century.

I write to learn the flow of history.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.

I read a lot of history for fun.

I love work where I can find out more about the world and its history.