Victor Hugo Quotes

In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

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.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

Being connected with individual lives reminds us in the most basic way of the human face of history. Too often we forget how significant the lives of ordinary people are.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.