Ken Liu Quotes

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

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 a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

A historian should not be didactic-that is a word that makes my blood run cold.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

History should be written as philosophy.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.

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

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

History is what we would make of it.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all; they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.