“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”
Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) p. 320 (1991)
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Simon Schama 1
British historian 1945Related quotes

“It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.”
Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Quoted in "Soviet Russia and the Middle East" - Page 46 - by Aaron S. Klieman - 1970

2000s, 2001, Freedom and Democracy Are Under Attack (September 2001)

Interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, 16 Feb. 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385083/

“That superiority has gone — forever.”
(British Pathé newsreel · They're Going To Get It - Roosevelt (1943) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_V6tL6QRQs)
1940s, State of the Union Address (1943)
Context: I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. But we are going to strike — and strike hard. I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them in Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland — or at several points simultaneously. But I can tell you that no matter where and when we strike by land, we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly. Day in and day out we shall heap tons upon tons of high explosives on their war factories and utilities and seaports.
Hitler and Mussolini will understand now the enormity of their miscalculations — that the Nazis would always have the advantage of superior air power as they did when they bombed Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and London and Coventry. That superiority has gone — forever.
Yes, we believe that the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it — and they are going to get it.

“It takes a few days to complete cycling the world,
but it takes forever to understand its ways”
Source: Sweetest song I know