Historical Method Quotes

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.

The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

The historical method has revolutionized Political Economy, not by showing its laws to be false, but by proving that they are relative for the most part to a particular stage of civilization. This destroys their character as eternal laws, and strips them of much of their force and all their sanctity. In this way the historical method has rescued us from intellectual superstitions.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

Did ole Hank really do it this way?

Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

The writers of history seem to entertain an aristocratical contempt for the writers of memoirs. They think it beneath the dignity of men who describe the revolutions of nations to dwell on the details which constitute the charm of biography.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth.