Robert E. Lee Quotes

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Readers appreciate the truth. Why say, 'Some think a situation is a mess?' Based on my reporting, if a situation is a mess, then I say that. The truth is always what reporters tell each other when they get back to the newsroom.

As Members of Congress and people of conscience, we must work to overcome the indifference and distortions of history, and ensure that future generations know what happened.

I just feel that I don't agree with sensationalized versions of history or me. Any version that's sensationalized.

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

One has to confront history honestly.

If you're going to be in the business of news and telling people the truth... you've got to be honest. You've got to have the same rules for yourself as you do for everyone else.

I have a hard time keeping a story straight when I tell the truth because when you start lying you have to remember what you said, and I'm not very good at that.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

First and foremost, telling historical stories is very tricky because it is something that is known. It is not like you can tell a lie or change something that is written in black and white.

When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

The historian has a special obligation to sobriety and fidelity to the record.

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest praise…. I hope to satisfy … by appealing to the evidence of actual events and of eyewitnesses.

It becomes him that writes an History, sometimes to extol enemies in his praises, when their praise worthy actions bespeak it, and at the same time to reprove the best friends, when their deeds appear worthy of a reproof; in-as-much as History is good for nothing, if truth (which is the very eye of the animal) be not in it.

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred

People are not likely to lie on the Internet about the atomic number of Rubidium, but they will lie about history.