Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.
quote by Samuel E. Morison
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.
quote by Doug Coupland
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize "how it really was." It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
quote by Walter Benjamin
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The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
quote by Simone Weil
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For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.
quote by Michael I. Rostovtzeff
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
line from Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 by William Shakespeare (1599)
Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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If you look at the history of the American capital market, there's probably no innovation more important than the idea of generally accepted accountancy principles.
quote by Lawrence Summers
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context. Even a god could not formulate a proposition on historical subjects like 2 x 2 = 4, for what is intelligible in history can be formulated only with reference to problems and conceptual constructions which themselves arise in the flux of historical experience.
quote by Karl Mannheim
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It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.
quote by Warren Christopher
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Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.
quote by Thomas Griffith
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If Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, and He did die on a cross at a point of time in history, then, for all history past and all history future it is relevant because that is the very focal point for forgiveness and redemption.
quote by Josh McDowell
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All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
quote by T.E. Lawrence
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Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.
quote by Napoleon Bonaparte
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I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle '60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater - which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time.
quote by James Earl Jones
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Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.
quote by David Suzuki
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Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship - and not as ends in themselves.
quote by Francis Schaeffer
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The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.
quote by Wynton Marsalis
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What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.
quote by Felix G. Rohatyn
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The revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, undertaken towards the end of the Babylonian exile, a revision much more thorough than is commonly assumed, condemns as heretical the whole age of the Kings.
quote by Julius Wellhausen
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One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
quote by George Crumb
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The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
quote by Bryan Magee
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