Chuck Klosterman Quotes

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

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.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Every presidential library is a reflection of the society at the time in terms of the media in it.

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.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

History illumes reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life

Network news will still play an incredibly important role in this country, but the world that Peter, Tom and Dan began covering 25 years ago isn't the same world today. Technology, lifestyle and what constitutes news have all changed dramatically. I'm not saying that it is better or worse. I'm just saying that it's reality.

News is only the first rough draft of history.

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.

The camera is the eye of history.

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

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.

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

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.

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