Frederick Kempe Quotes

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

History is a never ending argument.

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

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

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.

The context of history proved invaluable.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

History is always changing.

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

History seems to be so clumsy.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

I am not one to seek simple causes.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

I wanted to make connections between Whale's past and present.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

History is not made of up major media headlines and daily blogs and attacks.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past