Understanding Ourselves Quotes

Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

It's not just for its influence on us, but to know that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence that we have outside our own existence.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.