Rick Perlstein Quotes

The lessons of history are taught by the victors.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

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

We should be wary of politicians who profess to follow history while only noticing those signposts of history that point in the direction which they themselves already favour.

National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness.

As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists.

When you revise history, you lose it.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...

Falsification of history, at least by the suppression of facts and of relevant but distasteful contemporary documents, is one of the most unfortunate features of modern culture.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

What Does Trump See When He Looks Back In History? Mostly He Sees ... Trump

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

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.

History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it.

When you look back on things, your version is always perfect.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

What part of our history's reinvented and under rug swept? What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?

Where race is involved, there is a pronounced and proven tendency in the United States for the majority culture to willfully misremember the history and turn it upside down.