Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
We must not be misled by the claim that the source of all wisdom is in the government.
The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.
In 2003 I was saying, where are the ties [between Iraq] and al-Qaida? Where are the ties to 9/11? I knew it; where the f**k were these Democrats who said, 'We were misled'? That's the kind of thing that drives me crazy: 'We were misled.' F**k you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.
I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.
I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.
The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them.
Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.
I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
People treat citizens like they're some kind of unreliable source, but citizens are data. They are a data set.
Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.