History in Quotes

Time-travel paradox

Or is this historiography? Or alternative narratives? It's about how change happens, and how we think about it, and how we try to make others think about it... (Oh, and can we make change happen by pretending it already has? Popular in the 80s.)

This narrative that says that everybody before about 5 minutes ago was UNAWARE but now we are AWARE and YAY. (Dominic Fox ‏@domfox)

I tell my son my pink shirt is of an era. He doesn’t know what an era is, he’s ten years old. (Peter Andre)

People call terrorism "medieval". But it was a far less destructive age than our own. (@JonathanFoyle)

The moment we left the middle ages behind and set out on the track to modernity. (BBC trailer for programme, 2013 If you want to know what "Whig history" is, this is it.)

The past is never dead. It's not even past. (William Faulkner)

Britain between the wars - an era whose dying embers lasted until the late 1960s. (Steerforth)

The past has its past. (Time magazine on Mad Men, and putting 50s objects in a 60s interior)

It is a fallacy to believe the past is dead; it lives with us all the time and should teach us to inform all our present actions. (Spinoza)

Times have changed, people are different, that other generation is hypocritical and rigid but WE are not. (Moira Redmond on Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians)

Much as we would love to believe that we saucy and imaginative moderns are responsible for introducing misbehavior into a previously fun-free world, Miss Manners is afraid that the population, even back then, consisted of actual human beings. (Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour)

But one possible value that a gadfly like me can have is in noticing, over time, certain fashions and repetitions in thought and behaviour – certain cultural tics – and pointing them out. (David Aaronovitch Aug 2011)

1962 —The future still approached, although architect Charles Moore says that it “came and went in 1957”. (Web)

The present fashion of putting off marriage until the woman is about 35 and the man 40 or over is utterly unnatural and unwholesome. (As somebody said in 1919)

They looked up and the times had changed... (Amazon review of John Le Carré's The Looking-Glass War)

That most distant of periods, the day before yesterday. (Guardian 2008)

The world has not changed as much as we would like to think. (The Week, Sept 2011)

Some of the things that people face in some parts of the world, we have lived through in our lifetime in our world. It makes one wonder why they don't take advantage of our experiences. (friend JP, 2011)

South Asians and Arabs and their diasporic peoples are Elizabethans still. (Yasmin Alibhai Brown)

The 21st century is unevenly distributed. (@theunisbates)