A Quote by Nancy Pickard

History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.

Nancy Pickard

Quote Topics

Accuracy Anyway Because Even Events Ever Eyewitnesses History Lies Recalls Study Total Witness

Quote Author

Nancy Pickard
American - Novelist
Born: September 19, 1945

Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.

Winston Churchill

I want my work to become part of our visual history, to enter our collective memory and our collective conscience. I hope it will serve to remind us that history's deepest tragedies concern not the great protagonists who set events in motion but the countless ordinary people who are caught up in those events and torn apart by their remorseless fury. I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.

James Nachtwey

For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. These events, so distant in legend, play a part in shaping the very events we witness about us, each and every day.

Jacqueline Carey

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

Daniel Webster

The importance of recalls is to show that contaminated meat is getting out the door. And when you look at these recalls, in many ways the most disturbing thing about these recalls is how little of the meat actually winds up back at the plant.

Eric Schlosser

I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another.

Joan Sutherland

I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another.

Joan Sutherland

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

George Orwell

I try not to think about legacy because it is all folly. If you study history, even recent history, you'll find many people who were quite significant in their time but are completely forgotten.

Steve Martin

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert Kennedy

That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.

John Dos Passos

I really think you cannot ever escape your history, what you've done, who you are, and things you've tried to hide. Even if no one ever finds out the secret you're trying to keep, the cost of that keeping has been so great, that it's destroyed you anyway. In all my writing, there are people who desperately wish the past is not what it is.

Patrick Somerville

Beyond the earliest days of the religion, early Christians were believers because they'd been converted, not because they were witnesses to supernatural events, just like today. The 9/11 hijackers believed in Paradise for martyrs, but that doesn't mean that that's true. We have no good reason to imagine that eyewitnesses wrote the gospels rather than someone simply documenting the Jesus story as it had developed within their church community.

Robert B. Seidensticker

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

George Santayana

Arabs and their allies are conducting a total war against Israel. A total war means a war of lies. The PA [Palestinian Authority] promotes lies; lying in Islam is permitted.