Hilary Mantel Quotes

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

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.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

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

I'm a historian in my own mind.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

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.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

I write to learn the flow of history.

The way we make history exciting to learn about is by breaking down the barriers that are already set up between these people.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.