Hilary Mantel Quotes

We have to learn from the past.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period... I like to learn from the past... not 'live' in it.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

History is a pageant, not a philosophy.

I write to learn the flow of history.

The benefit of hindsight is we only really talk about those things that did work out.

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.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.