Historical Inquiry Quotes

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I'm not a researcher. I don't possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.

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

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

I do not start with a full knowledge of the facts; the whole attraction of writing history is to educate myself: it is an exploration into the unknown - 'a journey without maps,' to borrow Graham Greene's phrase.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

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

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

History is as much an art as a science.

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

As historians, we refuse to allow ourselves these vain speculations which turn on possibilities that, in order to be reduced to actuality, suppose an overturning of the Universe, in which our globe, like a speck of abandoned matter, escapes our vision and is no longer an object worthy of our regard. In order to fix our vision, it is necessary to take it such as it is, to observe well all parts of it, and by indications infer from the present to the past.

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 absence of romance from my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

No branches of historical inquiry have suffered more from fanciful speculation than those which relate to the origin and attributes of the races of mankind. The differentiation of these races began in prehistoric darkness, and the more obscure a subject is, so much the more fascinating. Hypotheses are tempting, because though it may be impossible to verify them, it is, in the paucity of data, almost equally impossible to refute them.