Carl L. Becker Quotes

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

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

I write to learn the flow of history.

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

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

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

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Leave history to historians.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

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 do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

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