History Matters

Try to keep in mind that everyone you encounter along the way, no matter their background or station in life, knows something you don’t.

I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.

The only thing new in the world, Harry Truman once remarked, was the history we don’t know.

History, I really believe, is best understood as an unfolding story. I think there’s more intellectual honesty in seeing it that way, from within what happened. The moment has gone, the characters are dead, but you can bring them back, re-create their ever-changing lives in such a way that the story does not sound monotonous, with an unrelieved tempo. Life does not come at us that way—why should history?

History is not the story of heroes entirely,” he said. “It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That’s why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history—they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

Happiness—true happiness—is not to be found in vacations or the like. It’s to be found in the love of learning and doing what you really want to get up and get to each day.

We don’t teach children. We just give them who we are. And they catch that. Attitudes are caught not taught. If you love something in front of a child, the child will catch that.

To be indifferent to history isn't just to be ignorant, it's often to be rude, to show a form of ingratitude.

I have often thought and said that the digital watch is the perfect symbol of our time. It only tells you what time it is now as if there had been no time before and no time to come.

is not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it.

The Golden Gate Bridge was built when Franklin Roosevelt was in his first term. It was built in the era of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It was built at the time of the Berlin Olympics. Built at the time of the abdication of the King of England for “the woman I love.” Built during the Great Depression. And built during a period when two of the most important events of the twentieth century took place, foretelling everything that has so changed in our world. Two events that took place not much more than one hundred miles apart. One, in Copenhagen, where Niels Bohr and his colleagues at the Institute for Theoretical Physics determined that if the uranium atom were split, it would release a power beyond any previous understanding or example. And just across the way at a small German fishing village, the Nazi government had instituted the first rocket experimental station under the young, brilliant physicist Wernher von Braun.