Lord Acton Quotes

We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.

Nobody knows what really happened in any historical period. There are some periods where we know more than others, though.

You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

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.

The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

Entertainment history is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more people, but 'histo-tainment' is superficial and lacks all context.

You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

If people really want to know and learn from history, why do they want bad history? Why don't they want good history? Wouldn't you rather know the truth, rather than the legend?

There is nothing more dangerous than mislearning the lessons of history.

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

I read more history books than anything else.

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not.

History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun.

In the Making Of book ["300"] there's a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a a frickin genius. He's a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn't sure how he'd react.

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

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.