A Quote by Erich Auerbach
To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.
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History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.
At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.
The most difficult thing in music is still to write a melody of several bars which can be self-sufficient. That is the secret of music. While the technique should be as perfected as possible, that is a lesser essential Anybody can acquire a brilliant technique Melody alone permits a work to survive.
String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself.
The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.
From collaborating with other people, you make concessions, and those concessions are great because sometimes you are definitely wrong.
If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.
As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.
The lives of heroes have enriched history, and history has adorned the actions of heroes ; and thus I cannot say whether the historians are more indebted to those who provided them with such noble materials, or those great men to their historians.
I start songs all the time. If I weren't so lazy, I would finish them. It's like when I have a deadline I have to. I always feel very lucky that I am forced to make records at certain times. If I was forced to make 2 records a year, I would write twice as many songs. I can't make myself finish something unless I am forced
Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.
I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I'm not one of them. If you're going to inhabit someone else's world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.
I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.
When the New Deal programs were passed in the mid 1930s, millions of workers were joining unions, striking, and occupying factories to fight for a better life. It was this radical labor movement that forced the establishment to make concessions.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.
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