
“History is bunk. What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?”
History is Bunk, Says Henry Ford, Special to The New York Times, New York Times, October October 29, 1921. p. 1
Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man
“History is bunk. What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?”
History is Bunk, Says Henry Ford, Special to The New York Times, New York Times, October October 29, 1921. p. 1
Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)
A Short History of Chemistry (1937)
Context: A great number of our common ideas and ways of looking at the world were really shaped for us by the Greeks of antiquity, and... incorporated into the scientific knowledge of today. Such ideas as those of matter, force, element, number, space, time, etc., came to us from the ancient Greeks.
“Not many people can lay claim to having broken Time, and we did it purely by accident.”
Source: The Search for the Red Dragon
Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
Context: And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
she replied, 'I want to die."
Sec. 48
In the T. S. Eliot poem, "The Waste Land", Petronius' original Latin and Greek is quoted: Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω. The translation generally associated with Eliot's poem is as follows: For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a bottle, and when the young boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?', she replied, 'I want to die' .
The quote refers to the mythic Cumaean Sibyl who bargained with Apollo, offering her virginity for years of life totaling as many grains of sand as she could hold in her hand. However, after she spurned his love, he allowed her to wither away over the span of her near-immortality, as she forgot to ask for eternal youth.
Satyricon