Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
631-640 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 601-610 611-620 621-630 631-640 641-650 >
631) The historian will always to some extent play the role of story teller -- selecting from a fragmented and disordered array of facts from the past, deciding which to foreground and ordering them into a narrative organization that will be meaningful to the contemporary reader. (Mike Chopra-Gant 59) [SoundBite #1258]
632) Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (George Santayana, The Life of Reason) [SoundBite #439]
633) Textbook authors...obviously believe that we need to lie to students to instill in them love of country. But if the country is so wonderful, why must we lie? (James W. Loewen 290) [SoundBite #1316]
634) Unless we know where we have been as a nation, it is impossible to know where we are going. (Rush Limbaugh 75) [SoundBite #186]
635) The principle of reenactment implies that the event being revisited actually did occur, but it also implies that this event still has meaning for us in the present. (Robert Burgoyne 11) [SoundBite #1378]
636) Citizens who are their own historians, willing to identify lies and distortions and able to use sources to determine what really went on in the past, become a formidable force for democracy. (James W. Loewen 312) [SoundBite #1327]
637) We would like to think of memory as an exact blueprint. We would like to think that when we experience something, it is accurately stored somewhere in our minds and can be recalled within a moment's notice. But do we actually have to physically experience something for it to be stored in our memory? Furthermore, what does it mean to "physically" experience something? Take sitting in a theater, for example. You are physically in the room, staring at a screen, taking in the images that are presented to you. Is this any less physical than actually being present for real live situations? The mind doesn't seem to think so. After all, the only thing separating us from the characters on the screen is the screen. It's almost as if we are watching real people in real situations. The mind is just as likely to recall these events as it is to recall events actually experienced. (Brendan Feeney, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1233]
638) Like many people of my generation, I owe my classical education to CinemaScope. I can trace the origins of my love of antiquity back to third grade, when I caught sight of a monumental close-up of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton frozen in an imminent kiss on a billboard announcing that Cleopatra was coming soon to a theater near me. (classical scholar Amelia Arenas) [SoundBite #1358]
639) For a people to be without history, or to be ignorant of its history, is as for a man to be without memory -- condemned forever to make the same discoveries that have been made in the past, invent the same techniques, wrestle with the same problems, commit the same errors; and condemned, too, to forfeit the rich pleasures of recollection. Indeed, just as it is difficult to imagine history without civilization, so it is difficult to imagine civilization without history. (Henry Steele Commager 2) [SoundBite #3]
640) Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. (Abraham Lincoln, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 2) [SoundBite #5]
