15 quotes
The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.”
The Origins Of History (1981)
About the scientific revolution: it “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes”.
Every age likes its historians to place events in a framework that corresponds with contemporary prejudices and answers to contemporary political desires.
Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (1955)
One of the paradoxes of history has been the way in which the name of England has come to be so closely associated with liberty on the one hand and tradition on the other hand.
Liberty in the Modern World (1952)
Since the 17th century England has had a happier fate than most of the countries of continental Europe. In particular she has been spared the most violent cataclysms and the bitterness of civil war.
The Englishman and His History (1944)
[T]he Aristotelian doctrine of inertia was a doctrine of rest—it was motion, not rest, that always required to be explained.
The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
And who amongst us would exchange the long line of amiable or prudent statesmen in English history, for all those masterful and awe-inspiring geniuses who have imposed themselves on France and Germany in modern times?
The Englishman and His History (1944)
But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.
It is not clear that continental countries, which have had their revolutions, followed by counter-revolutions, have greatly improved on the English rate of progress, in spite of what they paid in havoc and bloodshed precisely for the sake of speed.
The Englishman and His History (1944)
The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".”
The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)
A man who has written a single lyric may outlast the centuries, living on in perpetual youth; but the author of a hundredweight of heavy historical tomes has them piled upon his grave, to hold him securely down.
Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (1955)
It is always difficult to represent the place that power actually holds in the workings of politics and in the processes of history. Some men seem ready to speak as though power did not exist (because in their view it ought not to exist); and if others are emphatic about the reality of its presence they are assumed to be in favour of force, merely because they recognise its operation in the world.
Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (1955)
Considering the part played by the sciences in the story of our Western civilization, it is hardly possible to doubt the importance which the history of science will sooner or later acquire both in its own right and as the bridge which has been so long needed in between the Arts and the Sciences.
The Origins of Modern Science (1957)
Most of the basic ideas in the Renaissance view of history are still clearly present in the controversies in the latter half of the seventeenth century; but the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns—the controversy in the course of which a more modern view of progress was hammered out—is already visible at the time of the Renaissance.
The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
Whatever we may feel about the defects of our own Whig interpretation of history, we have reason to be thankful for its influence on our political tradition; for it was to prove of the greatest moment to us that by the early seventeenth century our antiquarians had formulated our history as a history of liberty.
Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (1955)