Historiography Example Quotes & Sayings

I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we - and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians - have imagined. — Paul A. Cohen

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

Who has not hoped
To outrage an enemy's dignity?
Who has not been swept
By the wish to hurt?
And who has not thought that the impersonal world
Deserves no better than to be destroyed
By one fabulous sign of his displeasure? — Jacob Bronowski

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write. — Gail Godwin

I always thought there would be ice in hell — Stanislaw Lem

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people. — Terry Pratchett

The Founding Fathers set up a system that heavily relied upon self-reliance and competition, with only a small dose of government intrusion. — Bill O'Reilly

As in, I wouldn't know normal if it marched up and poked me in the eye. — Becca Fitzpatrick

If I were a German today, I would be proud, proud but also worried. I would be proud of the magnificent achievement of rebuilding my country, entrenching democracy and assuming the undoubtedly preponderant position in Europe. But a united Germany can't and won't subordinate its national interests in economic or in foreign policy to those of the Community indefinitely. Germany's new pre-eminence is a fact - and its power is a problem - as much for Germans as for the rest of Europe. — Margaret Thatcher

You see a boxer with a beautiful nose and you got a fighter without heart. — Peter Rabe

She knew only one hint left by Rob: Enigma. There had been a few genius mathematicians who invented much more than a computing-like device, they figured out one of the most important intelligence formulas. Rob had programmed it in the Mold language. — J.M.K. Walkow