Quotes for All
The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, ‘The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.’ David Brooks
I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I’m interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it’s what I’m interested in, and it’s how I believe human behavior is legible. Dana Spiotta
If you think about the last 50 years, Africa’s proximity and historical context has absolutely been with Europe and the United States, but their approach in dealing with the economic challenges that Africa faces in particular has been one of handing out aid, not developing economies, not building a long term relationship around agriculture and … Read more
The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) andsets (transparencies, film strips, etc.). Its main purpose is to place the staged events in their historical context. Bertolt Brecht
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context. Ben Lerner
I was not aware of how much I loved ‘Canoa’ until I saw it after doing ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ and realized that my voice – over about the story’s historical context – that narrator – came from ‘Canoa’. Alfonso Cuaron
I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context… you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived. Reza Aslan
I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher’s positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm … Read more
Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything. Raymond Queneau