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Quotes from Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship — Herbert Butterfield

1900–1979 England

← All quotes by Herbert Butterfield

4 quotes

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)

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)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Herbert Butterfield (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.