“God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.”
“Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it”
“Even God cannot change the past.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, sect. 2, 1139b.
Variant translation: Not even the gods can change the past.
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 32
“To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.”
Prier Dieu c'est se flatter qu'avec des paroles on changera toute la nature.
Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)
Citas
Source: The Drunkard's Walk, Chapter 10, The Drunkard's Walk, p. 201
“The past is the past. You cannot change it, but you can learn from it.”
“Historians may lie, but History cannot.”
Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”
Historical Notes (p. 311)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
