Leon Aron Quotes

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

I've always been fascinated by how the past impacts the present. For the first half of my career as a novelist, I wrote psychological suspense mysteries. I wanted to be a therapist but was told that while I was a fine diagnostician, I would be a terrible therapist because I wanted to solve everyone's problems.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

It may not be art, but it is history.

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

The electronic media are not very good at history. It is a world of the eternal now.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

History happens all around us.

The past is a present force.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

No single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present.