Nancy Isenberg Quotes

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.

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

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

The lessons of history are taught by the victors.

History is easy to change.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

History is what we would make of it.

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

‎The past is always an invented land.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

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

History is the most dangerous substance that the chemistry of the intellect has created…. I makes men dream, intoxicates them, breeds false memories in them, aggravates their responses, takes up their ancient grievances, torments them in their sleep, carries them into the delirium of grandeur or else of persecution, and turns nations bitter, intolerable, and vain.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

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

Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.

The events of the War of 1812 have not been forgotten in England for they have never been known there.

What Does Trump See When He Looks Back In History? Mostly He Sees ... Trump

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it.

Most national holidays in most countries rest on selective memories of the past.