Donald Kagan Quotes

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

The role of government is, I believe, the most potent but underappreciated cultural issue in American politics.

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

To be a political philosopher is more a vocation than a career …. it is a vocation for thinking about the political. Not just day-to-day politics, but about the phenomenon of the political, that all communities of any degree of complexity organize themselves according to certain principles of justice, equality, reciprocity, and authority.

Architecture is a political art connecting our values to the ages.

Freedom of economic determination is inseparably linked up with civic rights and with the possibility of influencing and determining the social and political life of the commonwealth.

Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy.

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

All tradition is merely the past.

A republic may be called the climate of civilization.

Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.

You may not think about politics, but politics think about you.

History is the key to citizenship.

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

The practice of our democracy depends on a sense of, and knowledge of, history in the same way that playing in the World Series requires a bat and a ball.

Politics is history in the making.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Culture is coded wisdom

I think American culture had just become so disengaged from the process of government, and we'd been so fuzzed out by our pop culture around us, that I don't think people really saw this guy for what he was.

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.