Steven Pinker Quotes

History is only written from what remains.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

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

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

The present moment, if you think about it, is the only time there is. No matter what time it is, it is always now.

The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

An historian's task is to extol the famous deeds of famous men in order to incite the hearts of mankind to virtue, but to veil in silence the dark deeds of the base or. if they are drawn into the light, by the telling to place them on record to terrify the minds of those same mortals.

I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

In every epoch we should endeavor every time to ensure that the historical record is not overwhelmed by conformism …. Those who rule at any given time are the inheritors of all those who have been victorious. On the other hand, the oppressed class should study the picture of its enslaved ancestors rather than its liberated descendants

Richard M. Nixon ... has a deeper concern for his place in history than for the people he governs. And history will not fail to note that fact.

Divining the future is a lot easier and cheaper than documenting the present.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

Spain today, rather than a nation, is a cloud of dust remaining after a great people have galloped down the highway of history.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.

Society is a partnership not only by those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

Private grudges give rise to public measures. [Such matters] lie beneath the reach of ordinary historians.

When criminals go free, the hope is that history will come in and provide some level of justice. It won't correct the sins, but it will at least record them. The sinners would be known, and the victims' stories would be known.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.