Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.

History is always changing.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

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 nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

History is the greatest of dialecticians.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

History is a pageant, not a philosophy.

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.

History is sometimes hard. We study it and try to discover facts.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

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

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History after all is the true poetry.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.