Michael Dennis

“To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget.”
― Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

“Is righteousness, then, something 'fickle and changeable'? No; but the periods of time over which it presides, do not all proceed alike; they are time. Men, however, whose life on earth is short, are unable to conceive with their own minds the reasoning processes of earlier generations and of other races whom they have not known for themselves, whereas in the generations they do know, they can easily see what is appropriate within one and the same body or day or house, to each lib or hour or part and person. They are scandalized by the past, and enslaved to the present”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side--of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process-- of lawsuits, treaties, moralists' denunciations, literary satire, papal Bills. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something.”
― TUCHMAN BARBARA, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little, we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep. In quiet eventless lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh