“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, […] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.”

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 8

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 "History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, […] The generator of historical events …" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb196

Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former t… 1960

Related quotes

“In actual history, events overlap; you cannot, except by a confessed fiction, state the point at which the event called the Middle Ages ends and the event called the Modern Period begins.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925, p. 41

“All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 27
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

“History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 8, “A Game of Vampires” (p. 244)

“Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this ye call
A "great event" should come to pass
From that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!”

Robert Browning Pippa Passes

Introduction.
Pippa Passes (1841)

“Sometimes is a synonym which extends itself, and contrasts by just much the domain of its colleague. At other times it is an historical event which comes to modify and renew the vocabulary.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 113, cited in Alessandro Carlucci (2013), Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony. p. 74

“The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will…The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 2, “Probability and Coincidence” (pp. 37-38; ellipsis represents elision of examples)