Augustine Birrell Quotes

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

The true historian … reveres the fact rather than any theory.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

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

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).

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

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.

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

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

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

He who wants to make history bear on politics must be sure that his history is objective; otherwise, history will not influence politics, but rather politics history.

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.

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weakness and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than history.

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.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That's not history, that's psychiatry.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

As the primary end of History is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an Historian.

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?

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.