Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

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

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

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

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

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.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History is as much an art as a science.

Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

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