Brian Eno Quotes

Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

World events can shape culture. Music is either a soundtrack for or a narration of changing times. And who knows how that's going to go?

How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'

Every passing year brings us more past futures. Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin. It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

Tradition, by its very nature, includes continuous change.

Throughout history, we have only moved forward when society has distinguished between traditional values and valueless traditions.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence.

Creativity is not a mysterious thing, it's a historical thing.

Democratic foursomes don't work in the '70s like they did in the '60s, when there were fewer musical directions.

We live in crazy times - that is true - and things have gotten crazier, but it still doesn't feel like the turn of the century.

Life is short, but the years are long.

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die

It is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

I do think that every generation has its unique story.