Ezra Pound Quotes

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

I used my history degree about twice a year whether I needed to or not.

The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

I think you can learn from history.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

I write to learn the flow of history.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.