Alfred Kazin Quotes

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

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.

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

I think you can learn from history.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Making history whole is about uncovering secrets.

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

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

I write to learn the flow of history.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.