Historical Complexity Quotes

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more varied than anyone could have expected.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

The path towards a free society has not been simple. There are tragic and glorious pages in our history.

"History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

So, you could often say things are terrible and that accounts for what happened, or things are really bright, and that accounts for what happened. Often, the real explanation for what happened is much more subtle and interesting and involves maybe small shocks or what a couple people did on a Wednesday morning that changed the arc of history.

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

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

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

History is a tragedy, not a morality tale.

Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge 'facts' 'everybody' knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.

Originally, I thought the story of the Alamo was all these men defending their liberty when they could have left, knowing they were going to die. That's without a doubt what appealed to me, the romance and the nobility. But, as in life, the more you dig the more you find out that things weren't quite like that.

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

No one can know the full story of something as vast and complicated and as full of deceit as the War in Vietnam…The historians will not know it …

The true history of the American Revolution can never be written… A great many if the people in those days were not at all what they seemed, nor what they were generally believed to be.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries

History is but a confused heap of facts.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.

I don’t like trying to predict the future. I am a historian. I have enough trouble predicting the past.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.