Historical Investigation Quotes

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time, and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

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

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

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

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.

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.

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 understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

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

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

To implement real limits on government the judges must have reference to standards which are external to, and prior to, the matter to be decided. This is necessarily historical investigation. The content of those standards are set at their creation. Recourse to the intention of the framers in judicial review, therefore, can be understood as indispensable to realizing the idea of government limited by law.