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"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
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Personal Development

"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
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Personal Development

"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
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Personal Development

"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
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Personal Development

"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
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Personal Development

"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
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Personal Development

"Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason."
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Personal Development

"The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it."
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Personal Development

"It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state-a state that had its own courageous revolution-from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks-as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told."
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Personal Development

"Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself."
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Personal Development
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"When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."
History


"Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading."
Reading


"When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect."
People


"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."
Body


"The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives."
Survival


"It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable."
Age


"The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves."
Philosophy


"We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background."
Ability


"Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions."
Help


"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student."
Fun
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