It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.
More Quotes from George Steiner:
More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.George Steiner
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George Steiner
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
George Steiner
Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.
George Steiner
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George Steiner
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