George Orwell Quotes

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

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

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

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

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?

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

History is an agreed-upon fiction.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

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).

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

We may not have a future, but you can't deny we have a past.