Richard Norton Smith Quotes

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

I think you can learn from history.

The context of history proved invaluable.

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

I'm a product of older filmmakers I guess, the past where you get to make movies and scenes are what they are. You know if you think about Scorsese back in the day when he was making Taxi Driver, or Coppola or Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, they're making films where you witness violence in a real way.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.

A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

With social media and advertising and filters and FaceTune-ing it's hard to even to know what's real and what's not. So to see an image of a woman where you can actually see her face and her skin texture and she's still polished and beautiful or even glamorous with a nighttime look, but it still feels like a real person. I feel like that's the kind of beauty I want to applaud and align myself with.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

The real man of intelligence will not cling to any ideology - for what? He will not carry a load of readymade answers. He knows that he has enough intelligence so that whatever situation arises, he will be able to respond to it. Why carry an unnecessary load from the past? What is the point of carrying it?