Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

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.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.

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

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid expose, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I must admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons and our Lincolns, but the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

History is a battleground... but it has always been the case. Remembering is a radical act. Choosing what is important and what belongs in the overstuffed metaphorical dustbin of history is of vital importance.

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

When you revise history, you lose it.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

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

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

The only reason to keep talking about history is if you are juxtaposing it with the world that we live in today, if you are learning something about our world by looking at the way they shaped their world.