R. A. Salvatore Quotes

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

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

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

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 present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

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."

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.