Henry Adams Quotes

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

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

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

History is about who tells it.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

History is always changing.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.