Margaret MacMillan Quotes

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

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?

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

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

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

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all; they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

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

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.