Ellis Peters Quotes

What people will say about me then - or maybe not say - will be the only thing that finally counts.

You never know how history is going to view things.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

Today's headlines and history's judgment are rarely the same. If you are too attentive to the former, you will most certainly not do the hard work of securing the latter.

Good or bad is a matter of perspective. I met an immortal hunami once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?

Popular and good and bad is not the same thing.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

There are people who recall my father as a saint and a monster. I'm quite sure I will share the same fate.

To me, people are going to judge you no matter what, no matter how you put yourself out there. In my opinion, they can judge however they want to. Hopefully, it's in a positive light.

The infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next.

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends

History will decide if I'm a villain or a hero.

We can be judged in many ways.

You cannot look at a person and tell whether they're good or bad.

I think people can be quick to judge. The people that know me, they know what I am like.

I look into people's eyes and I know they think I'm a bad guy.

I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

I used to believe in em (lines). I don't anymore. They in our heads. Lines between black and white ain't there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and the so-ciety ladies too.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

Sinners often speak the truth. And saints have led people astray. Examine what is said, not the one who says it.

It isn't what we are, but what folks think we are, that counts in this world.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.