Quote

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

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Herbert Butterfield
Age: 78 †
Born: 1900
Born: October 7
Died: 1979
Died: July 20
Historian
Librarian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Oxenhope
West Yorkshire
History
Glory
Bridges
Another
Lose
Analysis
Past
Strange
Historical
Used
Present
Discovery
Mediation
States
Loses
Turned
Origins
May
Study
Sight
Surveys
Make
State
Research
Passage
Things
Rather
General
Passages

More quotes by Herbert Butterfield

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It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.
Herbert Butterfield
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The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.
Herbert Butterfield
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It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent.
Herbert Butterfield
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Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.
Herbert Butterfield
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If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.
Herbert Butterfield
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[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.
Herbert Butterfield
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In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.
Herbert Butterfield
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Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain, unless one can. do big things.
Herbert Butterfield
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About the scientific revolution: it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.
Herbert Butterfield
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The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.
Herbert Butterfield