Time & Perspective Quote by Bram Stoker

Stoker doesn’t ask you to believe in vampires; he dares you to call yourself sane while refusing the evidence. The line is built like a legal brief in Gothic clothing: firsthand testimony ("our own unhappy experience") backed up by precedent ("teachings and the records of the past"). It’s a clever rhetorical trap. If you doubt, you’re not just skeptical, you’re irrational, cut off from both modern empiricism and ancestral wisdom. In a genre that often leans on fog and vibes, Stoker reaches for something colder: verification.

The subtext is Victorian anxiety about what counts as knowledge. Dracula lands in an era obsessed with cataloging the world - medicine professionalizing, science becoming a public faith, anthropology and folklore being mined for "proof" of the primitive. This sentence stitches those competing authorities together. It flatters the reader’s rational self-image ("sane peoples") while smuggling in superstition as a legitimate archive. That phrase matters: "sane peoples" frames disbelief as a kind of cultural illness, a failure of civilization rather than an intellectual position.

Contextually, it echoes how Dracula is told: diaries, letters, transcripts, records. The novel is a scrapbook of documents pretending not to be a novel, and this quote is its mission statement. Horror becomes bureaucratic: terror authenticated, stamped, filed. Stoker’s intent isn’t merely to convince you vampires exist; it’s to show how easily modern minds can be argued into the impossible when the format looks like truth.