Carl L. Becker Quotes

#1. Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

Carl Lotus Becker

#2. Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity ... It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

Clifford Geertz

#3. Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept

Carl L. Becker

#4. Some artists are able to pull off a very form-fitting, painted-on look that's very modern, but I have actually come around to embracing the idea that that these costumes are more like athletic uniforms than high-tech skin suits.

Stuart Immonen

#5. History is the memory of things said and done.

Carl L. Becker

#6. Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

Carl Lotus Becker

#7. Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.

Carl Lotus Becker

#8. I am a melancholy type of person.

Alexander McQueen

#9. No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected ... to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

Carl L. Becker

#10. Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#11. Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

Randall Jarrell

#12. Always imagine him close to you when you pray,' she explained. 'If you think of Him as near, then that's where you will find Him. And if you think of Him as far away, then that's where He will be.

Ayad Akhtar

#13. Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

Carl Lotus Becker

#14. The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

Carl L. Becker

#15. Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.

Carl L. Becker

#16. I'm inspired by the music, always have been, always will be, it's only what a track or instrumental interpretation from a producer can do that will excite my pen into making magic for someone else to enjoy..Only the music inspires me..

Truth Hurts

#17. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.

Carl Becker

#18. All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Carl L. Becker

#19. I train six to seven hours every single day. I wake up six days a week and know that it's going to be the same thing.

Bryan Clay

#20. I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

A.S. Byatt

#21. We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

Carl Lotus Becker

#22. They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It's absurd.

Al Sharpton

#23. History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Carl L. Becker

#24. I've done so many Lifetime movies; at this point, I'll be going through airport security, and the lady there will be like, 'I took the weekend off and I saw four of your movies.' And I say: 'You've been watching Lifetime, right?'

Linden Ashby

#25. Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.

Carl Lotus Becker

#26. We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world.

Naoki Higashida

#27. To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.

Carl L. Becker

#28. All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

Carl Lotus Becker

#29. a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known

Carl Becker

#30. An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.

Steve Martin

#31. Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.

Carl L. Becker