Adam Curtis Quotes

History happens to one person at a time.

Of history, how little do we know by personal contact; we have lived a few years, seen a few men, witnessed some important events; but what are these in the whole sum of the world's past.

The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.

You cannot not know history.

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

What history is about is human beings.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.

I'm trying to tell history with a capital H through histories with a small h. It moves people, because you know in your own personal relationships, your own story, there's an echo to a much larger reality.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

There is a history in all men's lives.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

We are all historians in our small way.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

There was no special event that made me decide. I had collected some photos and the idea was in the back of my mind for a long time. It was growing and growing, so finally I said, 'I must paint this.' I come from East Germany and am not a Marxist, so of course at the time I had no sympathy for the ideas, or for the ideology that these people represented. I couldn't understand, but I was still impressed. Like everyone, I was touched. It was an exceptional moment for Germany.

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.

Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.