Lynn Townsend White, Jr. Quotes

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.

History is a means of access to ourselves.

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of music, and inventor of some sort of metronome.

Knowledge Qf history frees us to be contemporary.

Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.

We live in an era when rapid change breeds fear, and fear too often congeals us into a rigidity which we mistake for stability.