PhilosophyQuotes for April 4, 2001:

"In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures."

"...history, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorise' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments."

-Michel Foucault (1926-1984), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge is available online at Amazon.com.