Quotes About Perspective

We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.

We get our ethics from our history and judge our history by our ethics.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

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

I didn't see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn't make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it's art, that's great, but I'll let history decide.

History belongs to she who holds the pen...If we don't tell our stories, they won't be told.

The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.

Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

History is an argument without end.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

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

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

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, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

History without politics descends to mere Literature.

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

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.