Margaret MacMillan Quotes

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).

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

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 a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

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

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

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

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

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.

Nothing in the reporting of a nation's history could so mislead the younger generation as to represent great events in such a way that they appear to have happened as a matter of course.

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

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.