David Brooks Quotes

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

History is as much an art as a science.

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

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

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

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

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

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.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

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 the science of what never happens twice.

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 most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history.

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.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

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