Ray Stevenson Quotes

Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.

I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

History depends always upon what, for one reason or another, has survived from earlier periods, particularly upon what was written down or pictured.

With us [Jews] it is not open to everybody to write the records …. The prophets alone had the privilege obtaining the knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration which they owed to God….We do not possess myriads of inconsistent books conflicting with one another.

History consists of facts attested to by evidence.

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

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

History is a picture gallery where there are few originals and many copies.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

You can't cast Hittites as Trojans; I'd love to do it, but sadly, there are none available!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that pirates did wear eye patches and have peg legs and have brightly colored beads. I never knew what the beads were for. They really were for frightening and terrifying their prey.

One thing that struck me in my study of history is how people are excluded. I don't mean just racial minorities or women. Pretty much all poor people who don't have documents are excluded from history and its records. People who were illiterate usually didn't leave any primary documents.

In history books, or the one about the guy who cut his hand off to get out of a canyon in Utah, you really want them to be accurate. But my stuff is such small beer by comparison.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

I thought I'd write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn't have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died.

I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

We do not wish incorrect and unsound doctrines to be handed down to posterity under the sanction of great names, to be received and valued by future generations as authentic and reliable, ... Errors in history and doctrine, if left uncorrected by us who are conversant with the events, and who are in a position to judge of the truth or falsity of the doctrines, would go to our children as though we had sanctioned and endorsed them.

Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.

Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely well documented, they are not known. A king might be well documented but not everyone.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?