Thomas Sowell Quotes

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

Doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

Entertainment history is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more people, but 'histo-tainment' is superficial and lacks all context.

What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true.

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

History is more or less bunk.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

People are very resentful of elements in the history text books that are different from the history textbooks that they studied…. New knowledge has to be incorporated.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

People are always using the past for political purposes…. If they do, they should at least do their homework. l

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

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

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.

I know Leeds have had a few Scottish captains but I don't look too much to that because you can get lost in the history of the club. There's so much good history but it's all about the present and the future.

It's great to have a great past and history. But it's even greater to have a good future. So the most important history is the history we make today.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.