C. L. R. James Quotes

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

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

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

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.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

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.

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

It’s irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. What they think of me after I’m dead and gone in one generation will be determined by researchers who do PhDs on me, right? So there will be a lot of revisionism. As people revised Stalin, Brezhnev and one day now Yeltsin, and later on Putin. I’ve lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you’re dead.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

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

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

5,000 years of human history should not be overthrown by the acts of a few liberal judges or by the acts of a few local elected officials.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

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

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.