Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
While we read history we make history.
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
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.
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.
A lot of people can't remember things because they weren't actually there to begin with - they don't take it all in.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.
No opposing quotes found.