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“Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.”
Source : "The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939". Book by A. J. P. Taylor, "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14, 1957.
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“I've had my run in with trouble. Fortunately, you know, one slap on the hand is usually the last time for me... I learned my lesson.”
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“Geniuses come in many shapes and colors, and they often run in packs. If you can find one, it may lead you to others. Collaborate with geniuses. Send them your spells. Look carefully at theirs. What could you do together? Combination is creation.”
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“I really hate it when I can’t score runs from a ball.”
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“There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.”
Source : Aaron Copland (1980). “Music and Imagination”, p.10, Harvard University Press
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“Finally he closed the distance between us and kissed me - a sweet, gentle kiss that held within it every single one of the thousand days I'd loved him as my everything, long after I'd begun to love him as a friend.”
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“[talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.”
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“God does not so much want us to do things as to let people see what He can do.”
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“Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.”
Source : FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Jun 30, 2010 
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“I gravitate toward the larger worldview questions such as, Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? What does it mean to know another person? To love someone? Of course, those questions are sort of in the background as I'm playing with language in the foreground, but those are the informing questions.”
Source : "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.
