Quotes from Herbert Butterfield

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.

[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain, unless one can. do big things.

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

The very fact of its finding itself in agreement with other minds perturbs it, so that it hunts for points of divergence, feeling the urgent need to make it clear that at least it reached the same conclusions by a different route.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.

History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.