Leon Redbone Quotes

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

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

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

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

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

In reconstructing the past, historians generally are compelled to rely on accounts written after the event by participants and witnesses, or on the hearsay versions of those who learned at second-hand what had occurred. Such writings are subject to the infirmities of recollection, or of bias arising from allegiance to one side or the other.

If one does not forget one's previous experience, one can learn for the future from the past.

History is the greatest of dialecticians.

History is a never ending argument.

History is what we would make of it.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.