Charles Clarke Quotes

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

My true love is history, but I didn't know how I could make a living at it.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

To be straight, I was kind of a dork, and in order to fulfill the creative fires burning inside me, I participated vigorously as a Civil War re-enactor through most of my teenage years, traveling across the country to participate in large scale reenactments - grandiose plays enacted by over weight history buffs and war enthusiasts alike.

A nation builds museums to understand its own history and to have its history understood by others, to create a common space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually.

Today, we are fortunate that the historical novel has reached such extraordinary heights of technical mastery. The ability of society to connect with the past holds out the greatest hope for it being able to embrace the future.

To be at the forefront of something that can spark a major change as far as kids going to an HBCU and learning about our history and learning about our culture and learning about our ancestors, where we came from - that's a big thing, that's a really big thing.

It is important never to forget our history, but parts of our history are more appropriately displayed in museums, not on government property.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

The state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory that construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.

It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.

Technology is, in the broadest sense, mind or intelligence or purpose blending with nature.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

A wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates the tombes of its illustrious dead, repairs its greatest structures and fosters national pride and love of country, by perpetual references to the sacrifices and glories of the past.

I don't think China has professional museums - not in the past, present, or near future.

We should be in harmony with our own consciousness; our mind, body, and soul should be one in interest and in purpose. And in that unified condition, we can actually express that natural innate love that we have found in our own life in everything we do in the world.

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.