To knock a thing down when it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight of the blood. - George Santayana

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

The tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their equilibrium; while the incident of a too great disturbance causes that disruption we call death , or that variation of type , which , on account of it's incapacity to establish itself permanently, we call abnormal. Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable species ; and the aesthetic eye ,studying her forms ,tends ,as we have already shown , to bring the type within even narrower limits than do the external exigencies of life

We study the past as a dead object, as a ruin, not as an authority and as an experiment. One reason why history was less interesting to former ages was that they were less conscious of separation from the past. The perspective of time was less clear because the synthesis of experience was more complete. The mind does not easily discriminate the successive phases of an action in which it is still engaged; it does not arrange in a temporal series the elements of a single perception, but posits them all together as constituting a permanent and real object. Human nature and the life of the world were real and stable objects to the apprehension of our forefathers; the actors changed, but not the characters or the play. Men were then less studious of derivations because they were more conscious of identities.