Historical Record Quotes

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

Biography is the best form of history.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

Biography is the best history.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.

Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln's tombstone: 'He died an unbeliever.’

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

An artist is made to entertain. That's their primary goal, to entertain you. But some artists record the moments of time. You wouldn't know what was happening in the '20s and '30s; you got to check the song or art.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

I believe there should be a witness to every act in this world. So when I write about a film, when I speak volumes about it, I felt there should also be a witness to attest to its credentials, and this is especially for the conviction of future generations.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Private grudges give rise to public measures. [Such matters] lie beneath the reach of ordinary historians.

Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

I have always had a great interest in visually documenting the past.

In an outgoing transition, you start closing the books on today and start working for the history books.

Remove the document—and you remove the man.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.

The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in recorded history. And therefore, later on, if there will be a later on, anyone wishing to know will know where to go for knowledge.

I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.