“History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.”

—  Gilbert Highet

Peoples, Places and Books (1953) http://www.dim.uchile.cl/~anmoreir/varios/byzantium.html

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 a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much…" by Gilbert Highet?
Gilbert Highet photo
Gilbert Highet 7
British academic 1906–1978

Related quotes

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist
John Fletcher photo

“Go far—too far you cannot, still the farther
The more experience finds you: And go sparing;—
One meal a week will serve you, and one suit,
Through all your travels; for you'll find it certain,
The poorer and the baser you appear,
The more you look through still.”

John Fletcher The Woman's Prize

The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (c. 1611; published 1647), Act IV, scene 5, line 199.

William S. Burroughs photo

“Mexico city is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not struck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body. Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

Rodrigo Duterte photo

“Why will you go to Mexico now? Could you enjoy going to Mexico with kidnappings and killings there?”

Rodrigo Duterte (1945) Filipino politician and the 16th President of the Philippines

Bakit ikaw ba pupunta ng Mexico ngayon?


Duterte's 'oops' moment with the Mexican ambassador https://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/128758-duterte-crime-mexican-ambassador(April 8, 2016)

Ron Rash photo

“But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.”

Ron Rash (1953) American poet, short story writer and novelist

Source: One Foot in Eden

Emil M. Cioran photo

“Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

Woody Allen photo

“Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Interview in Der Spiegel, 2005-06-20 (as quoted by the New York Post) http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2005-06-29/
Context: As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 [... ] it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.

“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

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Brian W. Aldiss photo

“Why don’t you go somewhere quietly and consult your history books if you have no consciences to consult?”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Basis for Negotiations” p. 122
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

John W. Gardner photo

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

John W. Gardner (1912–2002) American politician

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

Related topics