Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

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

History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

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

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

People are very resentful of elements in the history text books that are different from the history textbooks that they studied…. New knowledge has to be incorporated.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

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

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.