Tony Judt Quotes

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

People have different ways of interpreting history.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

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.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.