Emily Greene Balch Quotes

There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

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

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

I really chess-play culture shifts. I'm really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That's what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

Political, social and economic realities are shaped by a historical process.

When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.

I believe history of humankind has always faced challenges. I don't think that any other period in history was less problematic then the one in which we live.

I'm interested in the balance between big currents in history - the economies, the ideologies, social structures, and so on - and the decisions that people have to make. At the heart of all these great decisions to go to war, there are human beings who have to say, 'Yes, let's do it,' or 'No, we won't do it.'

No political event can be judged outside of the era and the circumstances in which it took place.

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.

I always had a lot of confidence in my ability to gauge a situation and people and try to understand them and what they were saying and what their context was.

History suggests that economic upheavals such as the Industrial and Information Revolutions eventually play themselves out and leave the entire world better off.

Audiences change because life changes. Countries change geographically, climatically, socially and morally. Many things happen, and cinema, in a sense, reflects what's happening in the world.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.

Indian cinema is changing not because of outside pressure but because of inside pressure. Society is changing. Obviously, ideas change because of globalization, because of the huge middle class that is mostly first generation.

I'm very good at reading people - and very bad at math.

People have looked at all sorts of effects of globalization and blamed trade. But it's lots of things.

'Bradshaw's' is a lovely device for the time-travelling television presenter. I just hope that people buying it aren't doing so with the intention of plotting a tour of 21st-century Europe. They'll find quite a lot has changed since 1913.

The Caribbean world has changed radically since the 1960s, and postcolonial generations have very different mentalities from those that went before.

The only reason to keep talking about history is if you are juxtaposing it with the world that we live in today, if you are learning something about our world by looking at the way they shaped their world.

It's true in everything, not just in drag: To be a success, you have to understand the landscape. You have to know thyself, and you have to know your history so that you can draw from people who have figured out the equation you are faced with. It's not rocket science.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.