Top 13 Herbert Butterfield Quotes

#1. In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #175381
#2. If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #236384
#3. The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #383799
#4. 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

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #498309
#5. But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #541798
#6. 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

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #784107
#7. 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

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1149243
#8. 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

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1164780
#9. The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1495168
#10. Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1569779
#11. 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

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1712828
#12. 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

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1734558
#13. [History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.

Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield Quotes #1860289

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