Bernardine Dohrn Quotes

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred

My advice for telling someone else's story is to try not to consciously bend the story in any particular direction - to listen with an open mind, to include the good with the bad, to attempt to quell one's biases and allow the person you're writing about to emerge as wholly as possible, warts and all.

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

History is not history unless it is the truth.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then.

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it-you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

We do not wish incorrect and unsound doctrines to be handed down to posterity under the sanction of great names, to be received and valued by future generations as authentic and reliable, ... Errors in history and doctrine, if left uncorrected by us who are conversant with the events, and who are in a position to judge of the truth or falsity of the doctrines, would go to our children as though we had sanctioned and endorsed them.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

....we ain't doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.

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

You have to put yourself in my shoes as a person who believes in radical truth and in being radically transparent, not in seeing things through somebody else's eyes.

Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.

If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.

I find period pieces really difficult to get my head around. How can we know what it must have been like to be in Nazi Germany in 1944? The reality weighs on me because I feel like you want to try and honor what happened, but how can you truly know? I have never lived in a war or lost anyone.

So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.