Walter Russell Mead Quotes

Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

No single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present.

History is a dubious guide to current politics.

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

I definitely love history. I'm not formally trained or educated in history, but you could say I did go back to college in 2008 to do Untold History of the United States. That took five years. Co-author Peter Kuznick has been teaching history for something like 35 years, at American University and other places. His group of researchers brought me into contact with a lot of books.

We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.