T. S. Eliot Quotes

The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

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

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.

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

I'm fascinated about how past events shape our perception of current events and how they make us the people we are.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfections, can never have to us precisely the same meaning it had for them. We cannot tear down the barricade that separates the present world from things and deeds past.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

The present is the past biting into the future.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.