Historical Critique Quotes

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

History is the story of events, with praise or blame.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Stalin's methods did not help.

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

Historians, studying us, will say that we allowed corporations to become the government.

It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians.

So far I, at least, have no fault to find with implications of Hamilton's Federalism, but unfortunately his policy was in certain other respects tainted with a more doubtful tendency.

Though I do regard the Inquisition in general and the burning of Giordano Bruno in particular as blots on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I am far from being actuated by hatred of that church, and in fact cannot imagine that European civilization would have developed or survived without it.

Writing history is a difficult job: in the first place because what you put down has to correspond exactly to the facts; secondly, because if you permit yourself to criticize any wrongdoing, most of your readers will think that you are malevolent, or even envious.

Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.

The Victorians pioneered numbers of commercial rackets about which their descendants complain (the manufacturers of Bovril, it appears, were virtually official sponsors of the Boer War).

Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.

Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.