Roland Joffe Quotes

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.

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.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

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.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

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.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

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

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

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

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.