Michael Ignatieff Quotes

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

I write to learn the flow of history.

I used my history degree about twice a year whether I needed to or not.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

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.

Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

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

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

I had no interest in history classes. In fact, I used to sleep in history classes, I used to bunk classes. But that is how students are supposed to be, no? I developed an interest in history much later. I have made a few films based on historical facts.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

Most of us get our history through story.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals

History is what we would make of it.

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.

History is a picture gallery where there are few originals and many copies.