Idealization Of The Past Quotes

“The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions!”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me - obsessive, feminine love.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake

“Yet despite...accommodations with commerce, Möser regarded the market as primarily a threat--to the artisanal citizens of the town, to the traditional wants of the peasantry, and to the political structure to society, since it created a growing class of people outside the traditional paternalistic relations of the countryside. Möser's conception of contemporary political and economic trends in Osnabrück was essentialy tragic and tinged with that idealization of the past that would later be called romantic. Möser's heroes were the artisan-citizen and the independent peasant, his villains the shopkeeper and the peddler.”
― Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought

“If we were to trace the arc of this resplendent moment to its uncertain trajectory, we might arrive at a time 10,000 years hence in which our story is likely to be told, albeit in the past tense, with the requisite degree of speculation and inconsistency and according to the values, perceptions and prevailing paradigms swirling about its storyteller—who, most certainly, would be just as alien and unseemly to us as we, in our primitive ways, would seem to him... Of course, we can suppose there to be some level of idealization in the storytelling—even if he...were to examine fastidiously all records of our associations, contracts, interactions, transactions and endeavors, he would still come away with his own set of presumptions, in a manner, no different than the sort to be drawn away through the course of taking epistemological preference. Certain facts, agreements and events will unduly be assigned a preponderance of emphasis whilst others, though critical in their own time and to its chief actors, will be glossed over for their lack of sexiness to the keen observer of historical fact. Certain moments will be lost and others manufactured in their place, and these conscripted fabrications will define future idealizations of this moment of time—this, as you are sure to find, deeply critical moment in the history of our species.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Idealization is not reality; it is a dream, an expectation, and a projection that does not need a woman to be alive to still be beholden to its trappings.”
― Leanna Renee Hieber, A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America's Ghosts