Historical Objectivity Quotes

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

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

This system demands that the historian shall describe without indignation the most brutal atrocities, speak without love about the highest virtues and with his glacial eye see in social life only the manifestation of irresistible laws due to which every phenomenon occurs exactly as it inevitably had to occur

Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

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

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

He who wants to make history bear on politics must be sure that his history is objective; otherwise, history will not influence politics, but rather politics history.

Doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest praise…. I hope to satisfy … by appealing to the evidence of actual events and of eyewitnesses.

It becomes him that writes an History, sometimes to extol enemies in his praises, when their praise worthy actions bespeak it, and at the same time to reprove the best friends, when their deeds appear worthy of a reproof; in-as-much as History is good for nothing, if truth (which is the very eye of the animal) be not in it.

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).

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

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

History will only ever be partial, to a large extent history tells us what we think should be remembered and what should be forgotten, I find that really problematic.