"Ancient history has an air of antiquity...." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“As long as I have the friendship of the sesasons life will never be a burden to me.”
“It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolizethe whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part.”
“Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.”
More on History
“History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man's power in the world.”
“I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.”
“A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.”
More on Perspective
“It is important to realize that a large percentage of what we hear or see on the news focuses on those places where there is violent conflict...It gives us a slightly or very distorted view of what is going on because there are many other parts of the planet where there is no violent conflict, but that is not on the news.”
“Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.”
“At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.”