Some of My Favorite Quotes about History
(if you have a favorite quote about history not included here, feel free to e-mail it to me)
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, 1940
When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.
Julian Barnes, 1984
When an apple has ripened and falls – why does it fall? Is it because of gravity, because its stem withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?
Leo Tolstoy, 1869
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[T]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera, 1980
Historiography, I will continue to insist, cannot be a substitute for collective memory, nor does it show signs of creating an alternative tradition that is capable of being shared. But the essential dignity of the historical vocation remains, and its moral imperative seems to me now more urgent than ever. For in the world in which we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of collective memory and the declining consciousness of the past, but of the aggressive rape of whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of the powers of darkness. Against the agents of oblivion, the shredders of documents, the assassins of memory, the revisers of encyclopedias, the conspirators of silence, against those who, in Kundera’s wonderful image, can airbrush a man out of a photograph so that nothing is left of him but his hat – only the historian, with the austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central to his vocation, can effectively stand guard.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, 1982
The very possibility of historical scholarship as an enterprise distinct from propaganda requires of its practitioners that vital minimum of ascetic self-discipline that enables a person to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and, most important of all, suspend or bracket one’s own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers. All of these mental acts – especially coming to grips with a rival’s perspective – require detachment, an undeniably ascetic capacity to achieve some distance from one’s own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to imagine how the world appears in another’s eyes, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally – in the last analysis, to develop, as Thomas Nagel would say, a view of the world in which one’s own self stands not at the center, but appears merely as one object among many. To be dissatisfied with the view of the world as it initially appears to us, and to struggle to formulate a superior, more inclusive, less self-centered alternative, is to strive for detachment and aim at objectivity. And to turn thus against one’s most natural self – to engage in ‘this uncanny, dreadfully joyous labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself’ – is to commit that very sin against the will to power that Nietzsche so irresponsibly condemned.
Thomas Haskell, 1990
The primary task of a useful teacher is to recognize 'inconvenient facts' – I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts.
Max Weber, 1918
But the past is another country, and to bring it to some sort of dramatic life takes a capacity for which there is no English word. It was not until the eighteenth century that a German, J.G. Herder, coined Einfuhlen – the act of feeling one’s way into the past not by holding up a mirror but by steeping through the mirror into the alien world.
Gore Vidal, 1997
Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time … The aim of history, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past. For the present is simply the developing past, the past the undeveloped present … The antiquarian tries to bring back the past for the sake of the present; the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past. The goal of the antiquarian is the dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present.
Frederick Jackson Turner, 1891
And it becomes evident also only when one assumes that the past was not incidentally but essentially different from the present; when one seeks as the points of greatest relevance those critical passages of history where elements of our familiar present, still part of an unfamiliar past, begin to disentangle themselves, begin to emerge amid confusion and uncertainty. For these soft, ambiguous moments where the words we use and the institutions we know are notably present but are still enmeshed in older meanings and different purposes – those are the moments of true origination. They reveal in purest form essential features which subsequent events complicate and modify but never completely transform.
Bernard Bailyn, 1960
The belief that time is a linear directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact it can go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
Umerberto Eco, 1989
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[I]t is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is generally completely impossible to live without forgetting. Or, to explain myself more clearly concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873
