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Quote by Olivia Goldsmith

Work

The Bestseller

An engrossing story that explores themes of success, ambition, and the pursuit of the ultimate bestseller status more

Author

Olivia Goldsmith
Olivia Goldsmith

Olivia Goldsmith was an American author known for her suspense novels and biographies. Her works often feature real-life events as a backdrop, combined with fictional elements, and were well-received by readers. more

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“All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a danger. In much the same way healthy nations are interested in their history, but a morbid preoccupation with past glories is a sign that something is wrong with the constitution of the State.”

“The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.”