Historical Relativism Quotes

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

We somehow believe that our point of view is superior, higher than those of the greatest minds either because our point of view is that of our time, and our time, being later than the time of the greatest minds, can be presumed to be superior to their times; or else because we believe that each the greatest minds was right from his point of view, but not, as he claims, simply right.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

It is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present.

History is nothing but a procession of false absolutes.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

For academics like Stanley, shackled to the media machine, the past is not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.

All biography is the interpretation of events through the prism of another life and the mores of another time.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.