Sarah Bradford Quotes

Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

I do not fear truth. I welcome it. But I wish all of my facts to be in their proper context.

A creation needs not only subjectivity, but also objectivity.

It is taboo for us to criticize religion… but we have no such prohibition regarding history or geography…. If some one tells us that Tennessee is on the West Coast of the United States we are under no obligation to respect his view.

The ‘facts' of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. But experience not only furnishes the elements for the image which the sources guide us in forming: it is also the final court of appeal in evaluating the sources themselves.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.

You can have opinions, but it doesn't mean they're right.

I have been saying this from the beginning: people are going to say whatever they want to say or believe whatever they want to believe. I say this to people: stick to the facts.

Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact.

The truth isn't going to bend itself to suit you.

No matter what it is, I think people want the answer they want, they don't want the truth.

Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.

I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.

It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.

All that counts is the truth. Without it you're basically just juggling people's daft ideas.

The stronger the facts are there, you should achieve justice. You don't need to make sensationalized statements.

The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.