Chris Crutcher Quotes

Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same.

I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.

It's not the things you don't know that trip you up. It's the things you think you know, but you don't. You fail to ask a certain question because you believe you know the answer. Separating your information from your assumptions can be very tricky business.

People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

It is taboo for us to criticize religion… but we have no such prohibition regarding history or geography…. If some one tells us that Tennessee is on the West Coast of the United States we are under no obligation to respect his view.

It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

The longer you hold a belief, the less likely it is to be true.

People are always using the past for political purposes…. If they do, they should at least do their homework. l

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

The ‘facts' of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. But experience not only furnishes the elements for the image which the sources guide us in forming: it is also the final court of appeal in evaluating the sources themselves.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

Certainly, the illiterates of past centuries, then an enormous majority of mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries and of their civilization. In the minds of modern illiterates, however, who know how to read and write and even teach in schools and at universities, history is present but blurred, in a state of strange confusion; Molière becomes a contemporary of Napoleon, Voltaire, a contemporary of Lenin.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

People still believe what they read is necessarily the truth.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

When people talk about fake news, you know, a lot of folks just roll their eyes, like 'Oh, you know, whatever; people will figure it out.' The truth is, they don't always figure it out.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

Unfortunately, often found next to things that are true are an enormous number of things that are not - in websites, videos, books and on social media.

If you really think about it, if we begin to teach history exactly the way that it happened - good, bad, ugly, no matter what - I believe that we're going to find that we are closer, more connected than we are apart.