History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.
Writing history takes a great deal of imagination. I don’t mean making things up, but you have to be able to transport yourself to another time.
When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.
By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better & prepare for a better future.
Today, public understanding of our past and our system of government is pitifully low.
History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.
I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.
You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
It states, History should be regarded as a means for understanding the past and solving the challenges of the future. It also suggests that this celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of the history and heritage of the United States.
We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.
We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.
It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.
Understanding the past is perfectly admissible if your issue is accepting the past. But if your issue is changing the future, understanding will not take you there.
My wish is to humanize history.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
