Tuesday, March 01, 2005

WikiQuote: History, of course

A friend who writes at least 100 words a day sent me the above link. I don't "get" Wiki, and I don't use Wiki, but their History Quotation page includes a few I haven't seen before, including:
  • "History is not to be searched for practical lessons, the applicability of which will always be doubtful in view of the inexhaustible novelty of circumstances and combinations of causes, but just this, that the mind acquire a sensitiveness an imaginative range."-- Peter Geyl
  • "Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -- Alfred Whitney Griswold
  • "History is not a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches." -- Lord Acton
  • "It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." -- Good Omens (by Gaiman & Pratchett)

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