David Lowery Quotes

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

Most of us get our history through story.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

History is a big word... History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.