"When engineers write, we stop calling them engineers, and I think I know why: engineering is too close to the jugular. Like sex, politics, death, or good poetry, it defines us too intimately. It has the vulgarity of anything that touches us profoundly. Who expects writing from people who deal in things that close to the human heart?" John H. Lienhard, ASME Honorary Member, Engines of Our Ingenuity, No. 1010: "Technical Literates" (http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1010.htm)
"The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." Edward Hallett Carr, 1892-1982, British historian
"For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future." Miguel De Cervantes, 1547-1616, Spanish writer
"Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history." Lord Acton, 1834-1902, English historian
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, British writer
"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events." Adrienne Rich, b. 1929, U.S. poet, Of Woman Born (1976)
"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; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bulls[~]t." Tom Robbins, film director
"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature." Henry James, 1843-1916, U.S. author, Hawthorne (1879)
"That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius, 200?-118? B.C.E., Greek historian
"To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture." Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, Anglo-Irish playwright and author, in The Critic as Artist (published in Intentions, 1891)
"A historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel Eliot Morison, 1887-1976, U.S. historian noted for his works on American and maritime history
"It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language." Brian Friel, 1929-, Irish playwright and short-story writer
"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn." Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, British writer
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." Mark Twain, 1835-1910, U.S. author, as quoted in Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, Letter 37 (1899)
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." Winston Churchill, 1874-1965, British politician and writer
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation." Robert F. Kennedy, 1925-1968, U.S. politician
"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become." Fawn M. Brodie, 1915-1981, U.S. biographer, No Man Knows My History, Chap. 19 (1945)
"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." Willa Sibert Cather, 1873-1947, U.S. author
"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with the pale gleams the passion of the former days. What is the worth of al this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor." Sir Winston Churchill, 1874-1965, British statesman and writer
"Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilisation." George M. Trevelyan, 1876-1962, British historian, English Social History (1942)
"To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt, 1818-1897, Swiss historian who was one of the founders of the culturally oriented school of modern historical writing
"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman, 1823-1893, U.S. historian
"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Marcus T. Cicero, 106-43 B.C.E., Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher
"Now, it's not all that easy to learn real lessons from history-or from historians. You remember that marvelous variation of Murphy's law, which states that the first rule of history is that `History doesn't repeat itself--historians merely repeat each other.' Or the famous Churchill quote: `History is simply one damned thing after another.'" James R. Houghton, chairman and chief executive officer of Corning Incorporated, at a senior leadership meeting, Corning, New York, 8 February 1996 |
