James H. Sweet Quotes

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

Historians are responsible not only for the words they write but for the words they don’t write.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

People are very resentful of elements in the history text books that are different from the history textbooks that they studied…. New knowledge has to be incorporated.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

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

There may be no escape from the political aspects of setting the record straight on any genocide, and the Armenian Genocide more than most other mass killings has been the victim of deliberate, sustained falsication. Historians are embedded in those politics no matter how faithfully they attend to the obligations of their craft.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

History is so subjective. The teller of it determines 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 lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

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

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