Quotes About Interpretation

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.

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

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

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

All history is a lie!

But then history does not only consist of documents.

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.

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both.

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

History is what the evidence compels us to believe.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

There is an awful lot of difference between reading something and actually seeing it, for you can never tell, till you see it, just how big a liar History is.

The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.

There is one thing about knowing history, and another in recreating it.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.