
“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.”
David McCullough
more infosource: Interview with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, ca. 2002
category: book, creative process, history, research, writing
medium: Interview
via: Austin Kleon“One thing we do know, that we dare not forget, is that better solutions than ours have at times been made by people with much less information than we have. We know too, from the study of agriculture, that the same information, tools, and techniques that in one farmer’s hands will ruin land, in another’s will save and improve it.”
Wendell Berry
more infosource: “People, Land, and Community,” in The Art of the Commonplace (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002), 183.
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category: agriculture, farming, history, solution, technology
medium: Essay
“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.”
President Barack Obama
more infosource: remarks on Egypt, delivered in the Grand Foyer of the White House, February 11, 2011.
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category: Cairo, democracy, demonstration, Egypt, history
medium: speech
“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.”
Will Durant
more infosource: “More History from the Will Durants: Spry Old Team Does It Again,” by Jim Hicks, Life, October 18, 1963, 92.
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category: civilization, history, humanity
medium: magazine profile
“Part of the interest of any old book is its individual history, which can be gathered from the binding, book-plates, marginal notes, names of former owners, &c., and anything that tends to obliterate these signs is to be deplored.”
Douglas Cockerell
more infosource: Bookbinding, and the Care of Books (London: John Hogg, 1901), 306.
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category: authenticity, book, history
medium: textbook
notes: more info about Douglas Cockerell here
“History is open to interpretation, but it isn’t a toy dog you can make leap however you like.”
Neil Steinberg
more infosource: “Was Rome felled by gays or Goths or Christianity?” in the Chicago Sun-Times, December 3, 2010.
category: history, interpretation
medium: op-ed
“Geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night.
But it is this gleam which is everything.”
Henri Poincaré
more infosource: The Value of Science (New York: The Science Press, 1907), 142.
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category: death, geology, gleam, history, life
medium: nonfiction
via: Michael Deas“The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.”
Umberto Eco
more infosource: “Interview with Umberto Eco,” SPIEGEL, by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, November 11, 2009.
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category: collection, culture, history, list
medium: interview
via: Kevin Lippert“A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from — toward — ; it is the history of every one of us.”
Henry David Thoreau
more infosource: Diary entry dated July 2, 1851, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Vol 6 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884), 276.
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category: history, profession, travel
medium: diary
“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.”
Gail Collins
more infosource: “My Favorite August,” The New York Times, August 13, 2010.
category: boredom, frustration, hero, history, tedium
medium: Op-Ed
“This was B.G. (Before Google.)”
Maureen Dowd
more infosource: “Don’t Send In the Clones,” The New York Times, August 10, 2010.
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category: Google, history, time
medium: Op-Ed
“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.”
Wendell Berry
more infosource: “Family Work,” in The Gift of Good Land (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1981), 160.
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category: elderly, history, human condition, young
medium: nonfiction
“The end of an Empire is messy at best
And this Empire is ending
Like all the rest”
Randy Newman
more infosource: “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Harps and Angels (Nonesuch, August, 2008).
category: alpha, change, civilization, empire, government, greed, history, power
medium: lyrics
“History requires a world of time and bitter hard work when your ‘education’ is no further advanced than the cat’s; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a farthing’s value for your waste of time.”
Mark Twain
more infosource: Following the Equator (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1903), 301.
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category: education, history, interpretation, learning
medium: nonfiction
“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.”
Stephen Colbert
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