Historical Accounts Quotes

There was not a lot of great Civil War literature written by people who participated in it. It was too traumatic.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.

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

There are some people who believe that these are not real stories with real people, but they actually are.

Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

It contained eighteen thousand manuscripts on the sciences of antiquity alone. The books were arranged on shelves all around the rooms. The shelving was partitioned and enclosed behind shutters equipped with locks and bolts. In all there were more than one hundred thousand bound volumes. These included works on the laws of every religion, treatises on grammar and lexicography, collections of traditional lore, history books, royal biographies, essays on astronomy, works relating to the supernatural, alchemical research, all in various forms of writing.

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.

There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.

History: Gossip well told.

War makes rattling good history.

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

Study men, not historians.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply.

Some of the biographies [of princess Margaret] were really sensationalist, News of the World sorts, but they were great because they also gave first and secondhand accounts of her at home. The butlers come forward and give little moments, some of which you discard and some which ring somehow true and you use.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

Among the fables that inspired the British Admiralty's cartographic assignments to Captain James Cook in the 1770s and Captain George Vancouver in the 1790s was a 1640 account under the name of Bartholomew de Fonte that appeared in a journal with the delightful title 'The Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs for the Curious.'

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.

There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.

I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.