David Grann Quotes

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.

When you look back on things, your version is always perfect.

The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

All history is contemporary history.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

Those who read the fiction assume that, because I'm also a historian, I know what I'm talking about.

The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

I used my history degree about twice a year whether I needed to or not.

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

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

There are those who never reason on what they should do, but what they have done; as if Reason had her eyes behind, and could only see backwards.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.