“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past”
Source: Ways of Seeing
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John Berger 28
British painter, writer and art critic 1926–2017Related quotes
p. 82 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t2g73zj2z;view=1up;seq=100
The Ancient Greek Historians (1909)
The Golden Man (1954)
Context: "He can look ahead. See what's coming. He can — prethink. Let's call it that. He can see into the future. Probably he doesn't perceive it as the future."
"No," Anita said thoughtfully. "It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past. Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain. And he probably doesn't remember the past, any more than any animal remembers what happened."
"As he develops," Baines said, "as his race evolves, it'll probably expand its ability to prethink. Instead of ten minutes, thirty minutes. Then an hour. A day. A year. Eventually they'll be able to keep ahead a whole lifetime. Each one of them will live in a solid, unchanging world. There'll be no variables, no uncertainty. No motion! They won't have anything to fear. Their world will be perfectly static, a solid block of matter."
"And when death comes," Anita said, "they'll accept it. There won't be any struggle; to them, it'll already have happened."
Twenty Years of Mr. Justice Holmes' Constitutional Opinions, 36 HARV. L. REV. 909, 931 (1923).
Other writings
“The present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has been made by men.”
Introduction : Woman as Other http://books.google.com/books?id=kUW0AAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+present+enshrines+the+past+and+in+the+past+all+history+has+been+made+by+men%22&pg=PA122#v=onepage
The Second Sex (1949)
Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.
Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 1, Dead Stars, p. 3.
“I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future.”
Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute
Context: I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.
“The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.”
Source: A Town Called Dehra