Donald Kagan Quotes

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

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

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

History is clarified experience.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

Reading history while you make history can teach you a lot.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Leave history to historians.

My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.

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

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.