Francois Fenelon Quotes

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.

The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence.

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest praise…. I hope to satisfy … by appealing to the evidence of actual events and of eyewitnesses.

Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.

Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.

I don't read reviews, because if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad.

I believe that a man can only be useful to his country when he can look at it clearly.

To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.

It becomes him that writes an History, sometimes to extol enemies in his praises, when their praise worthy actions bespeak it, and at the same time to reprove the best friends, when their deeds appear worthy of a reproof; in-as-much as History is good for nothing, if truth (which is the very eye of the animal) be not in it.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.

History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.

Patriotism ruins history.

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

Objectivity means trying to give all sides a hearing. It does not, in my view, mean treating all sides as equal.

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.