Quotes About Truth

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

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.

I know one thing, that I know nothing.

The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.

The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Recorded history is wrong. It's wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

History is a romance that is believed; romance, a history that is not believed.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.