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Quote by Gordon S. Wood

“Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated process.”

Book:The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History

Work

The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History

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Author

Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood is an American historian renowned for his extensive research on the American Revolution. His book 'The Creation of the American Republic' won the Pulitzer Prize for History. more

“It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it a science'? Which speaking, discoursing subjects -which subjects of experience and knowledge - d you then want to 'diminish' when you say: 'I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist'? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.”

Science Knowledge Power Marxism History Of Thought

Book:Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

Source: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

“The madder it makes you, the harder you need to laugh at it.”

Inspirational Motivational Emotions Anger

Author:Destiny Booze

“It's hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who've been dead three hundred years. They can't come back and tell us, can they?”

Motives History Of Thought Ancestral Memory

Book:The Winter Sea

Source: The Winter Sea

“We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were from death to renewed life." -Peter of Blois (d. 1212).”