Christine Keeler Quotes

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

In the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

If there's anything about someone's life that's important enough to make a movie about it, I have to take responsibility to get all of it right. It's a huge responsibility.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

The historian has a special obligation to sobriety and fidelity to the record.

Lies are beginning to be solidified and made into historical fact…. The truth is all I want for history.

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

This 'historical record' will exist, flawed as it is, in hundreds of years. What will that tell the future? How accurate are we reporting our lives?

As the primary end of History is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an Historian.

I have a hard time keeping a story straight when I tell the truth because when you start lying you have to remember what you said, and I'm not very good at that.

I could drop dead tomorrow, the truth will be here. Truth is forever; when you read our history, truth is forever, and it always outs itself.

Most of the time, when the mainstream media reports on something, it never tells the whole story.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

The act of witnessing is important to me; somebody's got to tell the truth, you know what I mean?

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

It’s terribly important to write your own history before the historians get a crack at it.

… so that in 50 years no one could claim that this did not happen.

News is the first rough draft of history.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

There is, admittedly, a trend in popular history toward long books that bombard the reader with a fusillade of detail in the mistaken belief that accuracy is proportional to volume.