Edmund Morgan Quotes

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

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

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

My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

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.

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.

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

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

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

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

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

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

There is nothing more dangerous than mislearning the lessons of history.

The ‘facts' of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. But experience not only furnishes the elements for the image which the sources guide us in forming: it is also the final court of appeal in evaluating the sources themselves.

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

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.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.