Graham Hancock Quotes

In the past, Federal Reserve chairmen have not generally gone directly to the public.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

Well, I, you know, I think at PIMCO we always try and be open with the press and the public. I mean, isn't that what voters want from their politicians? Mohamed El-Erian, our CEO, writes several op-eds a week.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.

I'm truly glad I've managed to get the public interested in questions about basic research.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

Good history is a portal to the past.

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

You can't just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

History is ultimately storytelling. I think the more stories you write in life - and I've written a lot of screenplays, a lot of short stories - you realize it's your interpretation of events that people read, and they absorb that.

There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self.

I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.

With the birth of social media, a film gets left behind if the actors don't go and present their film and energy to the public.

For me, it's important to ask what are you making, and what's the public's relationship to that. And I say public relationship because I don't really care so much about any sort of reception.

Transparency will be at the heart of everything I do - it's what parliament expects, and it's what the public deserves.

The President can't go around in a steel box, as much as the Secret Service would like him to. Protection is an art form, keeping the President available to the public while protecting. Most of the hard protection is done by the police, the perimeter work.

It's really important to me that the public have confidence in their criminal justice system. We don't operate very well if the public doesn't trust us.