Rick Perlstein Quotes

History is past politics, and politics present history.

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

It is difficult to discuss... history.. it is more difficult to talk about today.. simple things…

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.

History! Read it and weep!

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.

"History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

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.