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Exlpore more History quotes

"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."

"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."

"The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy."

"Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."

"Every past is worth condemning."

"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."

"Upon examination of a people's history, beware the story teller's motives."
Explore more quotes by Steve Lacy


"They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind."


"It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up."


"I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio."


"When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all."


"It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing."


"Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same."
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