A Quote by Tara Westover

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

Tara Westover

Quote Topics

Became Byu Changes Discovered Fascinated Historians Historical Historiography History Idea Our Own Past Remember Shifts Study Then Trends Way

Quote Author

Tara Westover
American - Historian
Born: 1986

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.

Michelle Dean

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

Cary Elwes

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

G. M. Trevelyan

Historians of a generation ago were often shocked by the violence with which scientists rejected the history of their own subject as irrelevant; they could not understand how the members of any academic profession could fail to be intrigued by the study of their own cultural heritage. What these historians did not grasp was that scientists will welcome the history of science only when it has been demonstrated that this discipline can add to our understanding of science itself and thus help to produce, in some sense, better scientists.

I. Bernard Cohen

Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

Herbert Butterfield

If physicists could not quote in the text, they would not feel that much was lost with respect to advancement of knowledge of the natural world. If historians could not quote, they would deem it a disastrous impediment to the communication of knowledge about the past. A luxury for physicists, quotation is a necessity for historians, indispensable to historiography.

J. H. Hexter

Fifty years ago, historians advised politicians and policy-makers. They helped chart the future of nations by helping leaders learn from past mistakes in history. But then something changed, and we began making decisions based on economic principles rather than historical ones. The results were catastrophic.

Annalee Newitz

Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.

Geoffrey Barraclough

. . . What role does historiography play in the way a society and culture "remembers" past events? Does the historian have a moral or civic responsibility to this project of memory that ought to influence the way he or she engages in historical practice? Should moral concerns influence the historian's choice of subject matter, of issues to discuss, of evidence to use?

Michael L Morgan

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

Karl Jaspers

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

Joyce Carol Oates

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. ... But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own... He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.

Albert Schweitzer

I think it is vitally important to study History. If we are going to lead Britain safely into the future, it is essential that we understand our country's historical roots. If we can learn the lessons of the past, we will be able to avoid making mistakes in the future.

Tony Blair

Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.

Haile Gerima

The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.