Approach Quote by Sean Michael Wilson

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the…

— Russell Kirk

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because…

— Hannah Arendt

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always…

— Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

“History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past”

— Hilary Mantel

“The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.”

— Elizabeth Kostova

Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so…

— Ian Mortimer

“The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so…

— M.R. Carey

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by…

— Frank Herbert

“The hardest task for the historian… is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we’re…

— Christopher Evans

I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But…

— Francis Fukuyama

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

— Salman Rushdie

If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.

— Marjorie Garber