Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Quotes

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

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.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

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

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid expose, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I must admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons and our Lincolns, but the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

When you revise history, you lose it.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.