Mark Helprin Quotes

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

The study of history is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life.

I must try desperately to absorb all information I can about the Middle East. I want to excel. I want to speak articulately about the politics of the Middle East and its religion.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

The fact I have an education forms my lyrical style, I'm sure. I studied the social sciences, history, stuff like that. I have an interest in politics, which maybe works its way into the songs in small, subtle ways.

In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

If politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography - in other words, improvisation.

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

When the President is a moralist, he needs a process that will make up for the natural shortcomings of such a style—an inattention to second-step thinking, an allergy to detail, a tendency not to see the point of having dissenters, a habit of allowing certainty to override considerations of risk. It is the National Security Advisor’s responsibility to fill a President’s strategic gaps, not to exacerbate them.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.