His [Collingwood's] second thought is much more radical. The historical reconstruction of the past is itself nothing other than the work of the historical imagination. For the historian there are no data on which to hang imaginative reappraisal. The assumption that historians work from fixed, stable and settled information, as from tablets set in stone, serves only to confine and distort history which leads Collingwood to the view that far from it being the case that it is past fact which controls the imagination it is actually the imagination which controls what is to count as past fact.
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
We do not “create reality.” There clearly is a reality “outside” us. What we do create is our representation of it, and it is to this we are responsible.
“For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.”
