Agnes Repplier Quotes

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

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

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

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

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

History after all is the true poetry.

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.

Leave history to historians.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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