Quotes About Perspective

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.

All history is contemporary history.

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

Liberals in blue states just think that they are on the right side of history, and anybody that disagrees with them has to be a troglodyte or a neanderthal.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

History doesn't have a curfew.

History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.

If we have no other reality beyond the illusion, you too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

History is written by those who hang heroes.

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of posterity.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

Oh, things always get better. Tomorrow will always be better. Just think about it . . . is there any time in history in which you'd rather live than now?

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun.

History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.