Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass.
T. E. HulmeRead
No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.
Interpretation
History is subjective and cannot fully reflect reality without bias.
T. E. Hulme's quote highlights the inherent bias in historical narratives, suggesting that no account of the past can faithfully capture the entirety of events. Instead, history is a curated selection of experiences that inevitably favors particular perspectives, making it flawed and limited in its representation of reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about historiography to emphasize the subjective nature of historical writing.
Alas,we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.
If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.
Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: 'You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?' But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.
Of mankind in general, the parts are greater than the whole.
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