Paul de Man Quotes

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.

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

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

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

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

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

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

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

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.