Gerard DeGroot Quotes

I would never lie to anyone about history.

I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one.

If I don't tell it all now, the story in the history books will always be imperfect and that would be wrong.

Lies are beginning to be solidified and made into historical fact…. The truth is all I want for history.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

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

History is more robust than poetry because it is more truthful.

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

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

In the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

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

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

History is a distillation of rumor.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.