Bruce Catton Quotes

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

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

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.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

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

I believe we need to learn from our past.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

I can't change history but only learn from it.

I like history because you can't really progress without knowing what comes before you, so I think it's super fascinating.

The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

The past is another planet.