A Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity. — © Lion Feuchtwanger
What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.
History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context
The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.
That's why 'Gangnam Style' works. If someone handsome uses that phrase it's just awkward. But if someone like me uses it, it's funny.
There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.
I'm not that good looking. That's why 'Gangnam Style' works. If someone handsome uses that phrase it's just awkward. But if someone like me uses it, it's funny.
The facts of the fossil record never justified denying poor people a healthy diet. The facts of the weather record do not justify denying poor people affordable energy. And no set of facts, whatever they may be, can justify denying scientists - or anyone else, for that matter - the right to free speech.
The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.
I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.
The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.
I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.
Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.
So when someone, a veteran stands up and say, "Here are the facts on the VA." He [Donald Trump] says, "No, your facts are wrong." Turns out her facts are right and his facts are wrong.
Advocates of unrestricted abortion do not want the public to focus on these undeniable facts of fetal development, but the facts cannot be ignored.
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