Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History is often better understood and interpreted after some time has passed, allowing for a clearer view of the truth.
The quote by Theodore White suggests that the writing of history is a complex process that benefits from the distance of time. As generations pass, the facts, memories, and perceptions surrounding an event blend together, creating a narrative that may feel more truthful or acceptable, regardless of its accuracy. This implies that historical truth is somewhat subjective and shaped by the collective memory of society rather than being an absolute reflection of reality at the moment it occurs.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the accuracy of historical narratives, one might say, 'As Theodore White noted, history is best written generations after events.'
More from Theodore White
All quotes βPower in America today is control of the means of communication.
I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
Similar quotes
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My spiritual pain is unbearable. I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?
The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.
Simple assent to the gospel, divorced from a transforming commitment to the living Christ, is by Biblical standards less than faith, and less than saving, and to elicit only assent of this kind would be to secure only false conversions.
Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left...They were everything. Everything was there, in them...Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.