If people really want to know and learn from history, why do they want bad history? Why don't they want good history? Wouldn't you rather know the truth, rather than the legend?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
The only reason to keep talking about history is if you are juxtaposing it with the world that we live in today, if you are learning something about our world by looking at the way they shaped their world.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.
History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
If people don't like the history, I'm sorry.
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
We are set to make very bad history.
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