Herbert Butterfield Quotes

The ‘facts' of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. But experience not only furnishes the elements for the image which the sources guide us in forming: it is also the final court of appeal in evaluating the sources themselves.

I think I have a tendency to look at things subjectively rather than objectively when I reflect on my experience.

He who wants to make history bear on politics must be sure that his history is objective; otherwise, history will not influence politics, but rather politics history.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

Each one writes history according to his convenience.

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.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment

A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.

Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.

When you say, "History is written by the winners," you like to think about someone who isn't you. You want to think, "Oh, that's the juggernaut I'm standing against." But you're probably part of it.

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

I think it's for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than the play's merits or demerits. They must search their own souls, or whatever.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

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

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.