John Dos Passos Quotes

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

History is a battleground... but it has always been the case. Remembering is a radical act. Choosing what is important and what belongs in the overstuffed metaphorical dustbin of history is of vital importance.

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

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.