Ruby Bridges Quotes

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

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

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

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

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

One has to confront history honestly.

I think you can learn from history.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

Most of us get our history through story.

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.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid expose, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I must admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons and our Lincolns, but the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

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

When you revise history, you lose it.

It becomes him that writes an History, sometimes to extol enemies in his praises, when their praise worthy actions bespeak it, and at the same time to reprove the best friends, when their deeds appear worthy of a reproof; in-as-much as History is good for nothing, if truth (which is the very eye of the animal) be not in it.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.