Christopher Hamlin Quotes

History is too serious to be left to historians.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

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

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

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

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

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.

History is more or less bunk.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

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

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

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

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

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

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

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

I like to think I'm a recovering historian.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.