Gail Collins Quotes

It’s terribly important to write your own history before the historians get a crack at it.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

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

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

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

History is not what happened. It is what people wrote about what happened.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all; they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.

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

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

History is neither written nor made without love or hate.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

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

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

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

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

History is as much an art as a science.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

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.