Historical Record Quotes

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

Biography is the best form of history.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

Biography is the best history.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.

Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln's tombstone: 'He died an unbeliever.’

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

I believe there should be a witness to every act in this world. So when I write about a film, when I speak volumes about it, I felt there should also be a witness to attest to its credentials, and this is especially for the conviction of future generations.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

An artist is made to entertain. That's their primary goal, to entertain you. But some artists record the moments of time. You wouldn't know what was happening in the '20s and '30s; you got to check the song or art.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

Private grudges give rise to public measures. [Such matters] lie beneath the reach of ordinary historians.

Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

In an outgoing transition, you start closing the books on today and start working for the history books.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

I have always had a great interest in visually documenting the past.

Remove the document—and you remove the man.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

Journalism is not easy. It's the first rough draft. I don't think you need to wait around until you have the definitive thing. You record what's there; don't delude yourself that this is the ultimate historical view.

The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.