Dick Clark Quotes

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

History asks us to imagine ourselves in a period, but it's a very different situation when you're in that period and faced with those situations.

You cannot take one set of issues from one country and apply it to another. They are all different, in terms of history, and the religious compositions of the populations involved.

I think in this, definitely, because you are feeling how it felt to live in a completely different time. The mannerisms and the way that people behaved was quite different.

The average student of any historical period invariably reads into his interpretation the intellectual, moral and social atmosphere that lies nearest to him. He cannot strip away the intervening time-content between himself and the period in question. It is the most difficult of all exercises of the imagination, and to most men, indeed, impossible, to realize that the same words, names, customs and institutions connote totally different actualities in different stages of historic evolution. People fail to conjure up the altered perspective, and the unfamiliar background on which men lived, thought and felt in another age.

Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

You shouldn't expect people in the past to do things they couldn't have done.

The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights. Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations. I know of no civilization that tolerates or justifies violence, terrorism, or injustice. There is no civilization that justifies the killing of innocent people. Those who are invoking cultural relativism are really using that as an excuse for violating human rights and to put a cultural mask on the face of what they're doing.

It behooves us always to bear in mind, that while actions are always to be judged by the immutable standard of right and wrong, the judgments which we pass upon men must be qualified by considerations of age, country, station, and other accidental circumstances; and it will then be found that he who is most charitable in his judgment is generally the least unjust.

Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

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.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Therefore, we must not look at the African people, even before they met whites, as if they had something unique, which was not to be found in other societies.

Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect.

You cannot lecture another people about what you think is right or wrong based on your value system unless you're willing to accept others imposing their value system on you.