John Henrik Clarke Quotes

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

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

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

I want to have time. When you're doing a monthly book, you're like a man racing after a bus. You're breathless and red-faced. I want to build in quality control.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

I relish the eight-hour format of a single season because it gives you time to do that.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History after all is the true poetry.

I'm a man of history. My vision is guiding me, my clear vision. It is not by chance that the currents of peace are increasing daily inside Israel.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.