Revisionist History Quotes

History is written by the victors.

If we look too closely at many historical figures, we won't like what we see.

As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

All presidents are subject to the tides of revisionist history, their legacies constantly in flux.

History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their view. Or, at any rate, the victors' version is given prominence and holds the field.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

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

History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study - are not likely to get much attention.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

It's always what you did before. The year before is always so much better. Even when the critics hated what you did then, it always looks better five years later.

Yes, academia is often in the brainwashing business and revisionist history is alive and well.

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

The mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write in reviews of this book that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Totally absurd.

Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That's not history, that's psychiatry.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

John Silber said the single longest reference he could find to Abraham Lincoln [in Howard Zinn's History of America ] was two paragraphs. That was Howard Zinn. Would you like to hear how Ronaldus Magnus is portrayed?

Now, tell me how you're going to teach the history of Jefferson, and cut out all those quotes and cut out all these facts, and cut out the key line of the Declaration of Independence: We are endowed by our Creator. I mean you have to have a conscious deliberate censorship of America, which is what the left and the courts and the classrooms has had for 40 years.

When you look back on things, your version is always perfect.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past