Samuel Butler Quotes

I don't want to give myself grades. I will leave evaluation of my achievements to history.

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

I want to write for history, not for the moment.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

When I'm asked about legacy, I say it's too early to talk about legacy.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

As you get further away from a presidency you are better able to assess that presidency.

Young man, I have lived in this house many years and have seen the occupants of the White House across the square come and go, and nothing you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

Statesmen are judged by history beyond contemporary debates.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

… the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

No people ever sees clearly those steps in its own progress, those events in its own life, which future generations will count glorious.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Legacy? I'm a worker in the factory; all we care about is today! A legacy... what a bunch of baloney.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

I think a lot of times, the historical piece is often a way to comment on the present.

I think every writer wants future generations to read what he has written.