Paul Johnson 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.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history.

Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

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

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

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

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.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

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

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

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.