History is a very tricky thing. To begin with, you can’t get it mixed up with the past. The past actually happened, but history is only what someone wrote down.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
The human race . . . tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.
What I remember / hardly happened; / what they say happened / I hardly remember.
It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.
In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. Now, some have argued Columbus actually discovered the West Indies, or that Norsemen had discovered America centuries earlier, or that you really can’t get credit for discovering a land already populated by Indigenous people with a developed civilization. Those people are communists.
If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” . . . All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.
I want American history taught. Unless I’m in that book, you’re not in it either. History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
I think we should always look back on our own past with a sort of tender contempt. As long as the tenderness is there—but also please let some of the contempt be there, because we know what we are like. We know how we hustle and bustle and shove and push, and you sometimes use grand words to cloak it.
History is not truths versus falsehoods, but a mixture of both, a mélange of tendencies, reactions, dreams, errors, and power plays. What’s important is what we make of it; its moral use. . . . Perhaps history should show us not how to control the world, but how to enlarge, deepen, and discipline ourselves.
As soon as histories are properly told, there is no more need of romances.
It frustrates and fascinates me that we’ll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we’ll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.
Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.
As we unravel the past, the future also unfolds before us, as though they are mirrors without which neither can be seen.
