Historical reverence Quotes

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!

The post-assassination Lincoln took on a greatly amplified importance to much of the American public, probably the president most deeply reviled in his lifetime and mostly highly regarded after his death.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

The Japanese covet important symbols - their heroic past as enshrined in Yasukuni, the Imperial family which has never been sullied by scandal.

We can revere our past, but we cannot re-capture it.

Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.

I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.

I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past.

Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.

I just want to make my last demand in reverence to the work of what has been done by architects of the past. what was, has always been. what is, has always been. and what will be, has always been. such is the nature of beginning.

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

In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.

It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

I have great respect for the past.

We love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, and reformers. Our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys and Asburys, etc... We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch carefully over the first drop of our own.