A Quote by Michael Korda

The huge, turgid work of history, sinking under the weight of its own 'politically correct' thesis and its foot- and source notes, is not the British way of writing history, and never has been.

Michael Korda

Quote Topics

Been British Correct Foot History Huge Never Notes Own Politically Politically Correct Sinking Source Thesis Way Weight Work Writing Writing History

Quote Author

Michael Korda
English - Novelist
Born: October 8, 1933

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

Benedetto Croce

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

Stanley A. McChrystal

If my history, my indisputable British history, has never been visited, where does that put me? If we are only going to look at things that need a revisit, you are wiping me out of this country's history. That is unacceptable to me.

David Oyelowo

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

Gore Vidal

In Britain, British history is naturally a mainstream subject. Step outside your own narrow specialism, and you can find yourself treading on someone else's toes. But in America, British history is an eccentric, minority pursuit, and while this can be intellectually isolating, it also permits extraordinary freedom.

Linda Colley

In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I've been thinking about how subjective history is.

Sufjan Stevens

To me, racist jokes are not funny. I am politically correct, in a weird way. I like to push the boundaries that are politically correct.

John Waters

Be politically correct, but please don't bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that's the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation.

Karl Lagerfeld

I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.

Howard Zinn

The way Americans most understand the history of Latinos in this country, a lot of it is being told now through the lens of what's happening with the immigration debate. While that's an important debate that has security and moral implications, in my view, there's also a huge history of Latinos in the United States that's never been told.

Ken Salazar

As an African-American, as a woman I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

Rita Dove

As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

Rita Dove

'A Naval History of Britain' which begins in the 7th century has to explain what it means by Britain. My meaning is simply the British Isles as a whole, but not any particular nation or state or our own day... 'Britain' is not a perfect word for this purpose, but 'Britain and Ireland' would be both cumbersome and misleading, implying an equality of treatment which is not possible. Ireland and the Irish figure often in this book, but Irish naval history, in the sense of the history of Irish fleets, is largely a history of what might have been rather than what actually happened.

Nicholas Rodger

History without the history of science, to alter slightly an apothegm of Lord Bacon, resembles a statue of Polyphemus without his eye-that very feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person. My own thesis is complementary: science taught ... without a sense of history is robbed of those very qualities that make it worth teaching to the student of the humanities and the social sciences.

I. Bernard Cohen

It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.