Dave Barry Quotes

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

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.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

I had no interest in history classes. In fact, I used to sleep in history classes, I used to bunk classes. But that is how students are supposed to be, no? I developed an interest in history much later. I have made a few films based on historical facts.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

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.

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."

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

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

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

As historians, we refuse to allow ourselves these vain speculations which turn on possibilities that, in order to be reduced to actuality, suppose an overturning of the Universe, in which our globe, like a speck of abandoned matter, escapes our vision and is no longer an object worthy of our regard. In order to fix our vision, it is necessary to take it such as it is, to observe well all parts of it, and by indications infer from the present to the past.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

Leave history to historians.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

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

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.