James McBride Quotes

Every time we revise our history, we also revise the mythology of our history.

There's been about 75 movies about Jesse James, and I've seen about four of them. He's usually portrayed as this plucky rebel who's got no choice but to turn to crime, because the railway's hassling his mother. But he wasn't like that.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

'Mad Men' doesn't capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interaction. It is a total projection of contemporary snarky attitudes into the past.

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 ...

The West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.

All presidents are subject to the tides of revisionist history, their legacies constantly in flux.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

I wanted to re-examine stories people think they know without the rose-colored glasses of Hollywood and let the audience decide for themselves if people like Wyatt Earp were sinners or victims of life circumstances.

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

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.

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

Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet.

History is the lies of the victors.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

Now, tell me how you're going to teach the history of Jefferson, and cut out all those quotes and cut out all these facts, and cut out the key line of the Declaration of Independence: We are endowed by our Creator. I mean you have to have a conscious deliberate censorship of America, which is what the left and the courts and the classrooms has had for 40 years.

That's human nature - we want to completely rewrite history so it can be comfortable. Without getting too profound, I'm pretty sure that's where the invention of the afterlife comes from. "We don't really become worm food. We go to a magical place with bunnies and rainbows."

You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.

The western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

Today in many western countries, nobody dares question the Holocaust whose nature is questionable. According to the reports I have received, in America if people decide to write something against homosexuality on the basis of psychological and sociological principles, they will be prevented from publishing their work. How is it that these people feel obligated to respect freedom of expression?

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.

Living in Montgomery, I've been antagonized by the emergence of a narrative about our history that I believe is quite false and misleading, and actually dangerous. And the narrative that emerges when you spend time in the South - places likes Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana - is that we have always been a noble, wonderful, glorious region of the country, with wonderful, noble, glorious people doing wonderful, noble, glorious things. And there's great pride in the Alabamians of the nineteenth century.