Johan Huizinga Quotes

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

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

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

History is clarified experience.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

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

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

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).

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.