John Lewis Gaddis Quotes

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

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

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

What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

History, if thoroughly comprehended, furnishes something of the experience which a man would acquire who should be a contemporary of all ages and a fellow citizen of all peoples.

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

I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always take realities of today, lessons from the distant and recent past into consideration.

The past is another planet.

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

The great thing about dealing with people about whom we have historical resources, is that if the writing needs work, there's everywhere to go to enrich it.

If you're going to make sense of politics you have to have a historical perspective and also recognise that you have to work with people you don't agree with.

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

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."

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned By those who have not lived past it.

There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.

History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history, we are lost!

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background . This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.

The past is only the future with the lights on

The past is never where you think you left it.

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.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

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