Howard Zinn Quotes

History is not just a story related by a fool.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

That's the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn't.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

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

History is the shank of the social sciences.

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

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody, except merely its external facts... all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress [behind] closed doors - and no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.