Historical Integrity Quotes

It is for all these buildings, therefore, of all times and styles, that we plead, and call upon those who have to deal with them to put Protection in the place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof by such means as are obviously meant for support or covering, and show no pretence of other art, and otherwise to resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands; if it has become inconvenient for its present use, to raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one; in fine to treat our ancient buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that modern art cannot meddle with without destroying.

When you revise history, you lose it.

The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.

To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.

The dignity of history.

Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That's not history, that's psychiatry.

I'm a preservationist, I believe in preserving history intact, but I also enjoy the technological advances which have been made.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

History is not a heuristic tool for the articulation of an ideal imagined future. Rather, it is a way to study the messy, uneven process of change over time. When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions, we not only undermine the discipline but threaten its very integrity.

Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?

When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.

I think there's something inherently dishonest in trying to go back and mess with the past.

The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity (and the humility) of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.

I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

I still think, perhaps I'm a bit old fashioned - that truth matters. I think truth matters particularly when it concerns an event of such horrendous quality. Holocaust was the worst, probably the worst massacre, if you'd like to call it that, in the world's history - considering the scale of it and the fact that it was done deliberately during wartime.

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.

Falsifiers of history do not safeguard history but imperil it.

I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world?

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.