Posts in History
Wish I'd said that - August 24, 2017

"newspapers are fond of referring to the ‘dust-bin of history,’ a notion they borrow not from Karl Marx, as they think, but from an English writer and member of Parliament, August Birrell. On inspection the bin is much less full than is commonly believed. The repeats and returns in the last five centuries have been frequent."

Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence

Wish I'd said that - August 17, 2017

"to even begin to understand an era, we must visit it on its own terms, and project ourselves into its foreign mind. This is almost impossible to do, which is what makes it such fun. In a sense it means coming home, and finding your home made strange, for the people in the past didn’t think of themselves as living there. Like us, they thought they were living in the present. And then returning to our present, if we have learned anything, we begin to see it as another past."

David Warren in Western Standard December 20, 2004