Alex von Tunzelmann Quotes

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

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

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

History is as much an art as a science.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

Writing history takes a great deal of imagination. I don’t mean making things up, but you have to be able to transport yourself to another time.

I write to learn the flow of history.