Hannah Arendt Quotes

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.

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

I think certain periods of history don't get dealt with because I think historians, and it's their job, but they look back and look for patterns. They look for sequences and they look for reasons, and certain periods of history don't fit with the general pattern of 1500 to the 20th century, during which there's the creation of the United States.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

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

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

When years from now people look back on today, they will think the same thing they already do but with more reasons for it.

Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.

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

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give.

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

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.