Ronald Wright famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
-- Ronald Wright

#Inspirational #History Repeats Itself #Historian
Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error. Unlike other creatures we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes.
-- Ronald Wright

#Mistake #Luxury #Errors
Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet.
-- Ronald Wright

#Running #Real #Past
Like most problems with technology, pollution is a problem of scale. The biosphere might have been able to tolerate our dirty old friends coal and oil if we burned them gradually, but how long can it withstand a blaze of consumption so frenzied that the dark size of this planet glows like a fanned ember in the night of space.
-- Ronald Wright

#Dirty #Dark #Night
Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.
-- Ronald Wright

#Mistake #Believe #Thinking
Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.
-- Ronald Wright

#People #History #Society
America seemed a virgin land waiting for civilization. But Europe had made the wilderness it found; America was not a virgin, she was a widow.
-- Ronald Wright

#Europe #Land #Civilization

Some people care too much. I think it's called love.
A little Consideration, a little Thought for Others, makes all the difference.
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.
Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for another book to fill the void.
Silence ensures that history repeats itself.
There is that great proverb â€” that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

Ronald Wright famous quotes

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