Ron Chernow Quotes

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

We have to learn from the past.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History is more or less bunk.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

History is too serious to be left to historians.

It is hard to celebrate the past in an ecumenical way, or even in a fair-minded one, apparently. The trouble with the past is not just that it's behind us, it's that it is not even over yet.

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgement on the past.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.