"Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.“

-Tom Waits

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Tom Waits quote about history: "Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can'..."

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"Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago."

-Tom Waits

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"Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder."

-Tom Waits

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"My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane."

-Tom Waits

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"You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone."

-Tom Waits

"But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music."

-Tom Waits

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"As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time."

-Tom Waits

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"Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers."

-Carlos Fuentes

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"If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society."

-Strom Thurmond

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"For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats."

-Harry Browne

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"There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations."

-Claude Vorilhon

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"This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?"

-Azar Nafisi

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"What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history."

-Barney Frank

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