I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks again in us—it’s all sorts of dead old ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They don’t exactly live in us, but there they sit all the same and we can’t get rid of them. All I have to do is pick up a newspaper, and I see ghosts lurking between the lines. I think there are ghosts everywhere you turn in this country—as many as there are grains of sand—and then there we all are, so abysmally afraid of the light.
“Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum.”
--Lewis Mumford, quoted in The Clock of the Long Now
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
-- Ibsen, 1881
--Lewis Mumford, quoted in The Clock of the Long Now
--Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)