Quotes About History

History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests

Good historians...have the future in their bones

What is history? ... it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.

The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.

Aprender acerca del presente a la luz del pasado quiere también decir aprender del pasado a la luz del presente. La función de la historia es la de estimular una mas profunda comprensión tanto del pasado como del presente por su comparación recíproca.

What is history?, our answer, consciously or unconsciously, reflects our own position in time, and forms part of our answer to the broader question, what view we take of the society in which we live.

the facts of history never come to us pure, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.

the historian's need of imaginative understanding for the minds of the people with whom he is dealing, for the thought behind their acts: I say imaginative understanding, not sympathy, lest sympathy should be supposed to imply agreement ... History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.

The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere.

Washington resorted to this procedure during the 1780s, with the healthy teeth coming from his slaves, who received thirteen shillings per tooth, or about one-third of what Le Moyer typically paid on the free market.

It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the difference between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then.

In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew each other's business.

We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?

We have all been robbed of the land we have loved for a thousand years. Do you not see that, Welshman? Can you not imagine his rage? We were not even conquered. We were deceived.

La enemistad perdura. La amistad es menos segura. Sobre todo en esos tiempos.

England's Protestant," they declared. "Why else did we throw out the Stuarts? The government and their placemen are selling us down the river. If they'll give way over Catholics, what will they give way over next?

son los destinos individuales los que trazan el devenir de los grandes acontecimientos.

This Plantagenet king comes from the devil.

Edward Rutherfurd