A Quote by Samuel Butler
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
Related Quotes
Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
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.
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
God's Word is true whether we believe it or not. Human unbelief cannot alter the character of God.
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them.
You may alter an opinion, but you cannot alter a #? fact .
Yesterday you can't alter, but your reaction to yesterday you can. The past you cannot change, but your response to your past you can.
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
We cannot live in the past, nor can we re-create it. Yet as we unravel the past, the future also unfolds before us, as though they are mirrors without which neither can be seen or happen.
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.
Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.
The Tudors was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.
'The Tudors' was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.
I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.
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