Henry David Thoreau Quotes

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals

History is a picture gallery where there are few originals and many copies.

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.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody, except merely its external facts... all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress [behind] closed doors - and no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.

The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

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.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying entire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can't improve on these.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.