Robert Penn Warren History Quotations

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.