Lauren Byrne Quotes

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

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.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

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.

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

When you revise history, you lose it.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

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.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

‎The past is always an invented land.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

History is more or less bunk.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.