George Santayana Quotes

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

I have begun the 'History of England' by Mr. Hume. It seems to me very interesting, though it is necessary to recollect that it is a Protestant who has written it.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

Do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

‎The past is always an invented land.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.