Herbert Butterfield > Quotes

“The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.”
― Herbert Butterfield

“The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.”
― Herbert Butterfield, Origins Of History

“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, The Whig Interpretation of History

“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“While there is battle and hatred men have eyes for nothing save the fact that the enemy is the cause of all the troubles; but long, long afterwards, when all passion has been spent, the historian often sees that it was a conflict between one half-right that was perhaps too proud; and behind even this he discerns that it was a terrible predicament, which had the effect of putting men so at cross-purposes with one another.”
― Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations

“If history could be told in all its complexity and detail it would provide us with something as chaotic and baffling as life itself...”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“But the true historical fervour is the love of the past for the sake of the past… And behind it is the very passion to understand men in their diversity, the desire to study a bygone age in the things in which it differs from the present. The true historical fervour is that of the man for whom the exercise of historical imagination brings its own reward, in those inklings of a deeper understanding, those glimpses of a new interpretative truth, which are the historian’s achievement and his aesthetic delight”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History