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Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

— Daniel Levitin This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

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More quotes by Daniel Levitin

Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.

Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans.

The World in Six Songs (2008)

And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.

The Organized Mind (2014)

Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life.

All Daniel Levitin quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

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History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Daniel Levitin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.