What follows are a series of
quotations about history and the historian's craft. They have been culled from
a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their
purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination.
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"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce
"Since history has no properly
scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to
educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then
all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates
themselves." G. M. Trevelyan.
"To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of
a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which
we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies
which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a
wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different
conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt
"History is the witness that testifies
to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides
guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity."
"The past is useless. That explains why
it is past." Wright Morris
"Faithfulness to the truth of history
involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special
facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute
exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue.
The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.
He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character,
habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it
were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman
"History . . . is indeed little more
than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward
Gibbon
"There is properly no history; only
biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The study of history is the best
medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite
variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record
you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things
to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy
"What experience and history teach is
this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or
acted on principles deduced from it." G. W. F. Hegel
"Everything must be recaptured and
relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the
difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the
unity of history which is also the unity of life." Fernand Braudel
"The function off the historian is
neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master
and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." E.
H. Carr
"If you do not like the past, change
it." William L. Burton
"History does nothing, possesses no
enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man,
the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History,
as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her
purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their
purposes." Karl Marx
"An historian should yield himself to
his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing
apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel Eliot Morison
"History is for human
self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a
person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and
thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is.
Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what
they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has
done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and
thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood
"History is more or less bunk." Henry
Ford
"That historians
should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state
things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out
of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we
knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our
friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack
writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and
they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius
"You have reckoned that history ought
to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The
present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it
really was." Leopold von Ranke
"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless
flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the
depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark
against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow,
so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures
and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of
oblivion." Anna Comnena
"Only a good-for-nothing is not
interested in his past." Sigmund Freud
"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich
Nietzsche
"The historian does simply not come in
to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories
that have survived intact." Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history
of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own
time." Frederick Jackson Turner