Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

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

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

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That's crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, "This layer I support and this layer I cancel." History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

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

In the Making Of book ["300"] there's a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a a frickin genius. He's a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn't sure how he'd react.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

Completeness is rare in history.

It is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present.

We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.

When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

There is one thing about knowing history, and another in recreating it.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.

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

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.