Arthur Balfour Quotes

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

History is too serious to be left to historians.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

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

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

What history is about is human beings.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

I have begun the 'History of England' by Mr. Hume. It seems to me very interesting, though it is necessary to recollect that it is a Protestant who has written it.

I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.