Georg Brandes Quotes

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

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

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.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

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

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

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.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

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.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

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.