What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson gives us a precise answer: "Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices, intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past-often to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable value.
About This Quote
About Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Korzybski was a 19th-century American american scholar and philosopher. Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- History — Lessons from the past and the arc of human civilisation