Carroll Quigley Quotes

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

All biography is the interpretation of events through the prism of another life and the mores of another time.

I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.

Context is worth 80 IQ points.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

As a media artist and filmmaker, I'm constantly considering the role of situational context when creating my work.

I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.

… words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize

The larger the event, the less likelihood of having a single cause or origin.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

Many things influence a person's eating habits. Knowledge of what is considered healthy and what is not would be one, but I doubt it would make it to the top of the list.

Even if an episode is self-contained, the preceding episodes always affect how the audience takes it in.

Another part of the challenge was to bring back things that you've forgotten about and maybe some things you haven't forgotten about, recontextualize them and have the series make sense.

I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower

Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event.

I don't feel beholden to follow the real world at all. The important thing is to know WHY things turned out the way they did. You need to understand the reasons for events, or at least be able to make reasonable guesses about them.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

I was speaking within the confines of this specific event, the Brexit vote. The opponents are gonna blame everything that happens on the vote, and they're gonna have the media with them for the most part. It's gonna be a great thing to watch, lesson-wise.

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?

It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?

After the event, even a fool is wise.