“All history is contemporary history.”

This is a mission and a vision to do good as well as doing well.

Art is what everyone knows it is.

The writing of histories – as Goethe once noted – is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past…. The writing of history liberates us from history.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination.

Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.

Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human… No people will be truly free till all are free.

The translation called good has original value as a work of art.

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. Images are it’s only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them does not define them; it feels and presents them.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.

I read very little contemporary anything.

Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

In China, we don’t have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn’t even have a gallery.