Lee Majors Quotes

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

History seems to be so clumsy.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

Part of my attraction to ancient art is that there is an element of risk, of speculation.

When I see old movies with women in floor-length dressing gowns, or when they're going to the store and they've got a pillbox hat with a net over the eyes and white gloves, I'm offended that I can't go to the store like that.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

History is the great dust-heap... a pageant and not a philosophy.

It's not often as an actor you get to be involved with a project that seems to be on the right side of history.

I feel very proud of the work from the '80s because it is very bright and colorful.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.

I guess I feel very strongly that I disagree with the notion of personalizing history and movements and big events.

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

Fashion is an expression of a time, of a place, of history. It's putting things into context.

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

Even if you're playing the most well-known repertoire under the sun, I still believe you have a responsibility as an artist to tell the audience why you're playing it, what are the key aspects to it, and then throw in a bit about its historical context.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

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