Allen Johnson Quotes

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

The human mind can hardly remain entirely free from bias, and decisive opinions are often formed before a thorough examination of a subject from all its aspects has been made.

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

Nothing falsifies history more than logic.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

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.

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

I don't really think in absolutes.

All history is contemporary history.

All we can go on is what we think, how we see the world. If you can't trust your own mind what can you trust?

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.

If men were stubborn just in proportion as they were right, stubbornness would take her seat among the virtues; but men are generally stubborn just in proportion as they are ignorant and wrong.

I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.

What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.

The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.

Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.