Robert Walpole Quotes

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

[Read] anything but history,.. for history must be false.

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.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

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

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

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

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

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

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

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

I keep reading between the lies.

I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

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