A Quote by Hilary Mantel

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hilary Mantel

Quote Topics

Hindsight Historian Necessary Vice

Quote Author

Hilary Mantel
English - Writer
Born: July 6, 1952

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

John Hope Franklin

Reality looks much more obvious in hindsight than in foresight. People who experience hindsight bias misapply current hindsight to past foresight. They perceive events that occurred to have been more predictable before the fact than was actually the case.

Hersh Shefrin

Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.

Amos Elon

Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Lucky risk takers use hindsight to reinforce their feeling that their gut is very wise. Hindsight also reinforces others' trust in that individual's gut.

Daniel Kahneman

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Agatha Christie

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

Christopher Hitchens

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Joseph Conrad

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.

Shailer Mathews

Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.

Amanda Foreman

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Hilary Mantel

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.