Historical Speculation Quotes

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

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

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

History must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts over the future of the nation.

I'm Beginning To Wonder If It Would Have Been Best Had The South Won The Civil War.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

There's not an emperor or artist out there I won't read a medical history of, even if - or especially if - the author uses that medical history to spin out wild counterfactuals about how wars or masterpieces might have turned out differently. They're like delicious philosophical mints to roll around inside your mouth, just to see how they taste.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.

A new report claims that William Shakespeare was a marijuana user and may have been high when he wrote some of his plays. Which explains that one line: 'To be, or not to be . . . Wait, what was the question?'

Bryce Zabel and I went down the road of revising the Kennedy historical record together on the NBC seriesDark Skies. This time instead of giving new meaning to the established JFK chronology, hes created a brand new one altogether.Surrounded by Enemiesis an exhilarating ride, full of twists and turns that never were, but surely could have been.

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

I think they probably got it on, Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

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.

If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.

Some archeologists believe that Stonehenge - the mysterious arrangement of enormous elongated stones in England - is actually a crude effort by the Druids to build a computing device.

It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had either the Nazis or the Communists if that had happened.

The fascination with Judas has persisted despite the fact that there is no evidence of the hard facts of his life. Even the 'Iscariot' attached to him may be nothing more significant than a corruption of the name of the town from which he came.

James's expedition to Scotland is wholly imaginary, though there appears to have been space for it during Henry's progress to the North to pay his devotions at Beverley Minster.

A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?

We will never know what would have happened if President Johnson had said no to more troops and more war [in Vietnam]. We do know what happened when he said yes.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.