Quotes About Bias In History

#1. I have always believed there is great value in studying the flaws of mankind and men - even fictional characters. All of us are flawed. All of us are diminished by some form of prejudice and bias. If a fictional character is to be realistic, he must struggle with imperfections and weaknesses.

K. Lee Lerner

#2. What would be your first thought if you woke up naked, next to me in bed?"
"Huh ... it's kind of warm considering hell has just frozen over

R.S. Burnett

#3. Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.

Jacques Ellul

#4. Perhaps we shall also have to hold in check other coloured peoples who will soon be in their certain prime, and thus preserve the world, which is the world of our blood, of our children and of our grandchildren.

Heinrich Himmler

#5. The professor counsels against retrospective history, assuming that particular pieces contributed to an outcome.

Robert J. Allison

#6. There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

Alain De Botton

#7. I'm very, very fortunate to be in the job that I'm in, and I would love for it to continue forever, but it won't. I have to financially and emotionally prepare for the day that 'Mad Men' will go away, because who knows what my next job is going to be?

Rich Sommer

#8. Believing that the soldiers of the apartheid government really did use rubber bullets and carried batons only for decoration is seriously misguided, though understandable considering that newspapers were strictly censored, while history books abounded with Blatant Boer Bias.

Sumayya Lee

#9. Hard core authors are determined about their craft, and they know that building a brand entails hard work. They eat, breathe and live their writing.:

Geraldine Solon

#10. Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.

Peter Singer

#11. There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

George F. Will

#12. We have a history of gender and racial bias on our court that continues to undermine the system. Excluding individuals based on race is antagonistic to the pursuit of justice.

Anita Hill

#13. France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same.

Honore De Balzac

#14. Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.

Arthur F. Holmes

#15. Fellowships are important not for the money, but rather for the freedom from grant-related constraints.

Philip J. Guo

#16. it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants.

John O'Toole

#17. I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up

William Faulkner

#18. I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis

Antony Beevor

#19. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.

Carter G. Woodson

#20. I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Robert Darnton

#21. You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

Julian Seifter

#22. A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.

Raymond Geuss

#23. Just after writing those we were called up to defend a new position on the left, where the terrible storming of the bridge over the Antietam took place.

Joshua Chamberlain

#24. All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Carl L. Becker

#25. Homeschool history tells of more than two centuries of home-teaching influence on American education, although it has been largely obscured by the drawn curtains of conventional bias.

Raymond S. Moore

#26. If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.

Kathleen Rooney

#27. So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war.

Steven Pinker

#28. A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.

Bertrand Russell

#29. 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

#30. All history is really nothing more than the application of ideology to the past.

Tom Clancy

#31. (on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.

Bertrand Russell

#32. I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they'd be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.

Jodi Picoult

#33. We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.

Niall Ferguson