Eyewitness Accounts Quotes

The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime.

People need to trust what gardai say on the stand, and I can understand that perhaps in a scenario whereby lots of things are happening quickly and people are caught up in the heat of the moment, they may have a recollection that isn't exactly as things happened.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.

In Louisiana, President Bush met with over 15,000 National Guard troops. Here's the weird part, nobody remembers seeing him there.

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest praise…. I hope to satisfy … by appealing to the evidence of actual events and of eyewitnesses.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' I had eight people who were present at those interviews - they were all in the room - and when I interviewed each of them, they had a totally different narrative of events, to the degree where you thought, 'Were you all really in the same room?'

I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

How can I trust that the Bible is reliable?

I'm following a real event and real people.

One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."

There are plenty of eyewitness accounts, just because you're so narrow-minded you need to have everything shoved under your nose before you-

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense.

He who has heard the same thing told by 12,000 eye-witnesses has only 12,000 probabilities, which are equal to one strong probability, which is far from certain.

Open mind all the way. Because people have had eyewitness accounts, they've seen things, they swear they've seen things, and I tend to believe in people rather than - maybe I'm a little naive, but my optimistic outlook on life is to sort of be positive and take everyone at face value.

The only good histories are those written by those who had command in the events they describe.

The details given of these horros are too many and too detailed not to have in them a large amount of truth.

One of the great challenges of being a modern historian is interviewing multiple people who were all there for something, some event. No one's version matches up 100% with other people's, even if it's three or four people on a conference call.

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.

I met a congressman who claimed that he could introduce me to two people who saw Amelia Earhart.

Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.

The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.