Laurence Housman Quotes

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

History is what we would make of it.

All history is contemporary history.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

I only do a show when there's somebody I want to talk to.

An answer to a question no one asked is a wasted answer.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.

The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.

People love conversation, and movies are conversations, and an audience has to participate; it has to fill in some blanks.

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

Anytime you take a book and make it into a movie, you're going to have people who have their version of it in their minds and whatnot. You can't please everybody.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

Find the audience, be excellent, and you will be fine.

To air one's views gratuitously, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk.

I think that if people get my music, then they get what my message is.

It is not fair to treat as serious that which is only said in joke.

You can change the world, but if no one's listening, it doesn't matter.

I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered.

Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.