Peter Morgan Quotes

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

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.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

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

If people really want to know and learn from history, why do they want bad history? Why don't they want good history? Wouldn't you rather know the truth, rather than the legend?

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

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.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

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