Antony Beevor Quotes

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.

Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.

While we read history we make history.

Biography is the best history.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times.

I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. 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.

Of history, how little do we know by personal contact; we have lived a few years, seen a few men, witnessed some important events; but what are these in the whole sum of the world's past.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

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

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

History is more or less bunk.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

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.

Richard M. Nixon ... has a deeper concern for his place in history than for the people he governs. And history will not fail to note that fact.