Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; […]
History Quotes
A military leader of the first class cannot be content merely to win: he must also fight elegantly. History will not overlook his least little gesture, the minutest detail of his generalship. Historians will either improve his image by judicious chiseling and polishing or else represent him as a lucky deadhead and nothing more.
This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.
A land without ruins is a land without memories – a land without memories is a land without history.
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
I don’t care how experienced one gets working with histoirc documents – there is still something that sends a charge right up your spine… Our trade is preserving the real historic place, in real time, for this and future generations to see and experience – to get a ‘charge,’ if you will. That experience and […]
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.
It was during the debate on the Foreign Office vote that Stringham made his great remark that ‘the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.’ It was not brilliant, but it came in the middle of a dull speech, and the House was quite pleased with it. Old gentlemen with […]
