Isaac Asimov Quotes

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns.

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

The most important thing is story-telling. It's as singular and old-fashioned as that.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

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

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...

Falsification of history, at least by the suppression of facts and of relevant but distasteful contemporary documents, is one of the most unfortunate features of modern culture.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit.

False history gets written every day.

History is easy to change.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

People are not likely to lie on the Internet about the atomic number of Rubidium, but they will lie about history.

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy.