Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

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

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

As historians, we refuse to allow ourselves these vain speculations which turn on possibilities that, in order to be reduced to actuality, suppose an overturning of the Universe, in which our globe, like a speck of abandoned matter, escapes our vision and is no longer an object worthy of our regard. In order to fix our vision, it is necessary to take it such as it is, to observe well all parts of it, and by indications infer from the present to the past.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

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

So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.