A Quote by Min Jin Lee
I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.
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Do not feel trapped by the facts of your history. Your history is not some set of sacred facts. History is an interpretation, and your history is yours to interpret. To know the history and then reinterpret it gives you additional depth.
I was actually asked to do the Christmas design for the White House. I thought it would be interesting, given that it has such a rich history, to decorate around some real beautiful oversized images of the history of the White House and the history of the country.
(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.
I've heard - when I first started, people were saying, "You know if it ends up being Trump against [Hillary] Clinton, it's going to be the highest-rated debate in the history of television - or, show in the history of television. And they also said something else. It'll probably be the greatest voter turnout in the history of this country. That could very well be.
For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times.
I was always pretty interested in my history. Not just the history of the Caribbean, the history of my people, but all walks of life.
I feel history is more of a story than a lesson. I know this idea of presentism: this idea of constantly evoking the past to justify the present moment. A lot of people will tell you, "history is how we got here." And learning from the lessons of history. But that's imperfect. If you learn from history you can do things for all the wrong reasons.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
If, in schools, we keep teaching that history is divided into American history and Chinese history and Russian history and Australian history, we're teaching kids that they are divided into tribes. And we're failing to teach them that we also, as human beings, share problems that we need to work together with.
I am interested in constitutional history, political history, the history of foreign affairs, but I think you can get at those subjects through the details of daily life.
When I'm not governing my country any more, I'll go back to taking care of children. Or else I'll start studying anthropology - it's a science that's always interested me very much, also in relation to the problem of poverty. Or else I'll go back to studying history - at Oxford I took my degree in history. Or else...I don't know, I'm fascinated by the tribal communities. I might busy myself with them.
I'm a storyteller; that is what I do. And I'm particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.
I was also very interested in music. I used to hang out in jazz joints, you know, the Five Spot and so forth when I was, you know, a senior, really, when I was a little bit older. And I thought, well, maybe I could, you know, work with music. I can't play at all.
I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It's a continual path that shows we don't always know something, but we're always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.
The people [in the USA] are not very well informed. They certainly don`t know history. They certainly are not interested in foreign affairs very much, unless it comes right to their doorstep. They all learn history through wars. They learn geography through wars.
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