Robert Darnton Quotes

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.

Those old enough to write their memoirs should not comment on contemporary issues.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

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.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

History asks us to imagine ourselves in a period, but it's a very different situation when you're in that period and faced with those situations.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

Most of the films that I've ever really responded to are ones that I feel were really involved in their times.

I think in this, definitely, because you are feeling how it felt to live in a completely different time. The mannerisms and the way that people behaved was quite different.

You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

History written today is much more accurate than history written in the 18th century.

History is what we would make of it.

History is not a blueprint for present practice.