Nicholson Baker Quotes

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.

In the Making Of book ["300"] there's a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a a frickin genius. He's a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn't sure how he'd react.

To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

I've always read a lot of historical books and I'm a big fan of documentaries, and I've always thought of ways to do it.

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.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

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.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

Look, history is interesting. I read three books on George Washington last year. And my opinion is that if they're still analyzing the first president, the 43rd president ought to be doing what he thinks is right. And eventually, historians will come and realize whether... the decisions I made made sense.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History after all is the true poetry.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

I'm a man of history. My vision is guiding me, my clear vision. It is not by chance that the currents of peace are increasing daily inside Israel.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

The talent, including the talent for history - and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever - it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.