“At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.”

— Ralph Ellison

"The Golden Age, Time Past" (1959), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 239.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, o…" by Ralph Ellison?

Ralph Ellison 82

American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer 1914–1994

Related quotes

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

William Wordsworth The World Is Too Much with Us

The World Is Too Much with Us, l. 1 (1806).

“If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“Sometimes we waste too much time to think about someone who doesn’t even think about us for a second.”

Wiz Khalifa (1987) American rapper and actor

citation needed

“If we give it to our kids they are going to waste it. It’s best to invest it in our villages and our students. Eventually, they can do the same thing.”

Vinod Gupta (1946) American businessman

Business Opportunities, Vinod Gupta Lifelong Philanthropist, Nicolas, Smith, January 29, 2020 https://www.business-opportunities.biz/2020/01/29/vinod-gupta-lifelong-philanthropist/,

“We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.”

Joshua Ferris (1974) American author

“Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Context: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.