John Stuart Mill Quotes

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Time and space are absolute. Diseases are evil spirits that inhabit the body. Parallel lines never meet. The earth is the center of the universe. Children are miniature adults. At one time in history each of these beliefs was generally held to be true. Each, however, gave way to different ideas and even different world views.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

That which is the wonder of one age is the commonplace of the next.

Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.

I never had the vaguest idea whether any of it had anything to do with me, especially being a sixth grader. When I got older and traveled, I'd read about the history of where I was going. I'd be like, "Oh, history is kind of interesting."

Preparatory human beings. - I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honour to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day - the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture we live in, and that culture is the product of man. There is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture.

It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

You just have to sort of figure out how to - getting back to that word, "balance" - how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies.

As the Chinese will tell you, history depends on your point of view.