Historical Limitations Quotes

History is only a feeble light, for the rubrics were meant to answer future problems unimagined and unimaginable

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody, except merely its external facts... all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress [behind] closed doors - and no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.

History is the always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there