Michael Rostovtzeff Quotes

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

I don't normally do pure historical work.

We need to read history from the source.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

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 do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

History is as much an art as a science.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.

I would love to be an historian. I'm a bit of a history geek and love books and programmes on the subject.

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.

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 writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history-born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man-has made tremendous advances in the last generation.

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

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

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