David Talbot Quotes

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

History is a big word... History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

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.

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

History after all is the true poetry.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

I had no interest in history classes. In fact, I used to sleep in history classes, I used to bunk classes. But that is how students are supposed to be, no? I developed an interest in history much later. I have made a few films based on historical facts.

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.

Most of us get our history through story.

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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

I write to learn the flow of history.

Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too.

I love to read history; at its best, it is an art.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.