Mary Anastasia O’Grady Quotes

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

When you revise history, you lose it.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

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

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history. There's no question that various victors throughout history have flat out lied about certain events or written themselves into things, and then you come along and you find out that this disproves that.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Most of us get our history through story.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

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.

If you really think about it, if we begin to teach history exactly the way that it happened - good, bad, ugly, no matter what - I believe that we're going to find that we are closer, more connected than we are apart.