Voltaire Quotes

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

History is a never ending argument.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

History is about who tells it.

I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

In reconstructing the past, historians generally are compelled to rely on accounts written after the event by participants and witnesses, or on the hearsay versions of those who learned at second-hand what had occurred. Such writings are subject to the infirmities of recollection, or of bias arising from allegiance to one side or the other.

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

History is nothing but a procession of false absolutes.

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

Many try to force the past to change.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

History takes time... History makes memory.

The political control of truth quite naturally calls up Orwellian impressions, but in fact the manipulation of knowledge goes deeper than censorship and is more subtle than outright propaganda. It can include conditions under which research will be funded and given a forum, and also the designation of legitimacy to be conferred or withheld in specific fields of inquiry. Jobs, tenure, professional advancement, all can come to depend on taking the approved line. Along with these comes the adjacent phenomenon of the "institute" and "think tank," in most cases with official backing of one sort or another. And then too, there is the way universities pressure their faculties to bring in big money by securing government projects. What all this scrambling means is that in the struggle of memory against forgetting we must compete with official versions and special interests, with public and private demands for serviceable knowledge, with the kinds of on-line information geared to short-term needs. Amid this din the scholar’s independent voice is hard to hear.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

History is merely gossip.

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.