Jose Rizal Quotes

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 ...

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

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

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

Historians can no more avoid politics than the air they breathe.

History is about who tells it.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

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

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence.

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

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

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.