Evan Parker Quotes

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

I think there's true drama in the formation of everything that we know and are standing on the shoulders of.

The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.

History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.

I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

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.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

The context of history proved invaluable.

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

I've always been excited to know how we got here.

I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.

Education is what remains when what is learned has been taken away.

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives.

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

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

So much of what we understand comes from knowing what something is and what that something used to be, which allows us to figure out, or at least imagine, what happened in between.

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development

If we want to know history, I would think there would be every reason to.