Anything but history, for history must be false.

 

Anything but history, for history must be false.
--
Walpoliana, No. 141.

 

Robert Walpole

» Robert Walpole - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day...
The lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.

 

Adrienne Rich

 

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.

 

Karl Popper

 

Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women’s history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.

 

Arthur M. Schlesinger

 

I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

 

Henry Ford

 

I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

 

Stephen Jay Gould