Historical Discourse Quotes

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

Politicians are often tempted to deploy history as a weapon against each other.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

To converse with historians is to keep good company…

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

The processes of history in themselves … pose an interesting question- among so many others, that of their status. The status of a process may be affirmative, negative or interrogative. But the status of historical discourse is uniformly assertive, affirmative. The historical fact is linguistically associated with a privileged ontological status: we recount what has been, not what has not been, or what has been uncertain … historical discourse is not acquainted with negation.

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, "This can't go on; let's build a European Union." And it just wasn't like that.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

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

I think criticism, or a critical engagement with history, has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

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

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.