Spencer Wells Quotes

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

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

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

History is what we would make of it.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

History turns me on. I was terrible at it at in school, but as I get older, I get more and more into it.

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

I would love to be an historian. I'm a bit of a history geek and love books and programmes on the subject.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question is no, you dont.

Doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.

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.

My basic notion regarding the matter of historical recognition is basically, it's a matter that should be left to the good hands of historians and experts.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

History is sympathetic to its authors.