Daniel Pauly Quotes

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

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?

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

People are always using the past for political purposes…. If they do, they should at least do their homework. l

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

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.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

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.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.

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

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

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

In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.

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.