Kwasi Kwarteng Quotes

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

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.

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

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

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.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

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.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

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.

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

When you revise history, you lose it.