“A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.”
The Past as Present : Forging Contemporary Identities Through History
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Romila Thapar 9
Indian historian 1931Related quotes

“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), I
Context: Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect — as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, “the blues” which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.

p. vi http://books.google.com/books?id=h7JT-QDuAHoC&pg=PR6, as cited in: Patricia R. Allaire and Robert E. Bradley. " Symbolical algebra as a foundation for calculus: DF Gregory's contribution http://poncelet.math.nthu.edu.tw/disk5/js/history/gregory.pdf." Historia Mathematica 29.4 (2002): p. 409.
Examples of the processes of the differential and integral calculus, (1841)
review of All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/remember-when-niven-was-fun, 2015
2010s

Source: Speech in Lancaster (8 November 1980), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), p. 59, p. 61.