What Is History? Part 9 by Clyde N. Wilson • March 27, 2008 • Printer-friendly

Truth does not reside in a collection of facts; truth is shown by the form of their presentation, once their significance has been seized on. In the record, little of all this is given. Telling the truth, then, requires sagacity and style, art in composition and skill in exposition. —Jacques Barzun

Let us guard against stripping our science of its share of poetry. Let us also beware of the inclination, which I have detected in some, to be ashamed of this poetic quality. —Marc Bloch

The “facts” of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter. —Carl Becker

Historical knowledge is dead and worthless that has not as its sounding-board and its measuring-rod the historian’s personal intellectual and spiritual life. —Huizinga

The State has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is talking nonsense; and it can’t stop. —G.K. Chesterton

Among the advocates of many popular movements are always some who cleverly manipulate the history of the past in their desire to give an air of ancientry to their ideas and to find a precedent furnishing a warrant for action. —Charles M. Andrews

The historical knowledge of a good many persons consists of an enthusiastic belief in a few things that are not so.
—C.M. Andrews

To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity. —Roy P. Basler

Historians, it is said, fall into three categories: those who lie, those who are mistaken, and those who do not know. —Unknown

The course of history reflects a continual contest between limited, orderly processes of development and historical accident. —H.C. Meyer

Progress is not the necessary path of the human animal but simply a contemporary, and essentially materialistic, way of describing the events of the past so as to make the present seem superior. —Kirkpatrick Sale

In the repeated decay and breakdown of one civilization after another, after it has acheived power and centralized control, one may read the failure to reach an organic solution of the problems of quantity. —Lewis Munford

The level of ignorance on Abrahahm Lincoln and race in the United States is a scandal and a rebuke to schools, museums, media, and scholars. —Lerone Bennett

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