Jacques Barzun Quotes

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

Nobody knows what really happened in any historical period. There are some periods where we know more than others, though.

Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.

I'm really interested in modern history, but to fulfill a History degree at Brown you have to do modern and pre-modern.

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

I read more history books than anything else.

I am a great student and fan of history.

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.

I'm sorry to say it has some historical analogs. It's kind of reminiscent of what happened in Germany in the late Weimar years.