Quotes About Perspective

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

I wonder why we hate the past so.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

A pacifist will often - at least nowadays - be an internationalist and vice versa. But history shows us that a pacifist need not think internationally.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Today's headlines and history's judgement are not the same.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.

History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present.

All history is a lie!

But then history does not only consist of documents.

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

If you don't learn about each other, you do not understand each other, and you don't hide warts and all, both sides, then you're forever going to repeat history.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important.