C. S. Lewis Quotes

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

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its 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.

You cannot not know history.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

One should live with history round one.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

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.

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.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

Our history is a passion for me. I feel that we leave out so much information and huge gaps in the American story and it makes it hard for people to really understand that we are all intricately related as Americans. So I am attracted to historically based projects because we entertain and learn something at the same time. I just love that combination.

To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.

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 starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

Power is knowing your past.

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

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.