Elizabeth Coleman Quotes

I think you learn more from looking at how things occurred and what happened afterward, not just at the event.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

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

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.

You must read history forward and not backward.

As one looks back over history it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if individuals or nations had acted differently in certain crises. I often wonder if these speculations will serve to give any of us more courage in facing new situations!

History is one of those things that politicians tend not to use.

I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

[T]he Constitution was a product of its times. [Progressive]

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History after all is the true poetry.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

I'm a man of history. My vision is guiding me, my clear vision. It is not by chance that the currents of peace are increasing daily inside Israel.

Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.