history
I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene. He said, in his great admonition to writers, “Make me see.” I try to make you see what’s happening and smell it and hear it. I want to know what they had for dinner. I want to know how long it took to walk from where to where.
Interview with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, ca. 2002
As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business—eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused—and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays or new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street. These are the sorts of things that fill our lives and thoughts, and yet we treat them as incidental and hardly worthy of serious consideration.
At Home (New York: Anchor, 2011), introduction, 3–4 [reprint ed.].
There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place. This is one of those moments. This is one of those times. The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.
Remarks on Egypt, delivered in the Grand Foyer of the White House, February 11, 2011.
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civili-zation is the story of what happened on the banks.
“More History from the Will Durants: Spry Old Team Does It Again,” by Jim Hicks, Life, October 18, 1963, 92.
History is open to interpretation, but it isn’t a toy dog you can make leap however you like.
“Was Rome felled by gays or Goths or Christianity?” in the Chicago Sun-Times, December 3, 2010.
We always need to remember that behind almost every great moment in history, there are heroic people doing really boring and frustrating things for a prolonged period of time.
“My Favorite August,” The New York Times, August 13, 2010.
I’m sorry, I’ve never been a fan of books. I don’t trust them. They’re all fact, no heart. I mean, they’re elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American! I’m with the President. Let history decide what did or did not happen.
White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 2006
The young are born to the human condition more than to their time, and they face mainly the same trials and obligations as their elders have faced.
“Family Work,” in The Gift of Good Land (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1981), 160.
The end of an Empire is messy at best
And this Empire is ending
Like all the rest
“A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Harps and Angels (Nonesuch, August, 2008).