“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”

Quoted in Rhoda Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970), p. 280.

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

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John W. Gardner8

American politician 1912–2002

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“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

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“We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

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“Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history."”

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“Neither in the ancient pagan world nor in any other culture has human history ever been thought to have an overarching significance. In Greece and Rome, it was a series of natural cycles of growth and decline. In India, it was a collective dream, endlessly repeated. The idea that history must make sense is just a Christian prejudice. If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itsel£. Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds.”

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Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”

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Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“If you believe that science and technology have given us the highest standard of living in history or that they have trapped us inside of a machine we can't escape from, we live in a situation we inherited, as a result of a long and complex series of events through history.”

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Context: If you believe that science and technology have given us the highest standard of living in history or that they have trapped us inside of a machine we can't escape from, we live in a situation we inherited, as a result of a long and complex series of events through history. At no time in the past could anybody have known that what they were doing then would end up like this now.

“When history looks back, it will prove what I'll die knowing.”

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“Keep in mind, as a student of history, as I’m sure you are, never has Afghanistan been a united country, not in all of its history. Not in all of its history.”

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2021, July 2021, Remarks by President Biden on the Drawdown of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan

“When you’re in this room, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s soaked in history. It just washes over you. I mean, it’s not even like it’s in the past. You’re in history. You’re in it.”

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Source: " Stephen Colbert Tells Rep. Adam Schiff What Russian Oligarch Revealed About Trump 'Pee Tape' https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stephen-colbert-adam-schiff-pee-tape_n_616e2de7e4b00cb3cbd6ead0" (2021?)+videos

“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”

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John W. Gardner8

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