E. L. Doctorow Quotes

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

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

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

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.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

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

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

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

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

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.