N. T. Wright Quotes

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.