Edmund Snow Carpenter famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

History is full of delightful reversals, where the opposite of what one predicts comes true.
-- Edmund Snow Carpenter

#Opposites #History
If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
-- Edmund Snow Carpenter

#Artist #Addresses #Cliche
No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly."
-- Edmund Snow Carpenter

#Art #Attitude #Men
The White House is now essentially a TV performance.
-- Edmund Snow Carpenter

#White #House #Tvs

To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect,
It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.
The tenor of my life has been the opposite of everything that is vile, and no man can lay any such thing to my charge.
It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.
Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Edmund Snow Carpenter famous quotes

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