Sufjan Stevens Quotes

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

We must consider how very little history there is--I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

The value that I found in interviewing was for an educational experience, just to know that history itself is subjective, that you can't say, "It happened." Do the best you can with what you think happened, but a lot of other people are going to see it happening differently.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

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.

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.