Historical Necessity

Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or necessity:

“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All this costly culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neglected, carries a whole revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred history to some future ages.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)