History — the product, not the raw material — is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.

All history is present history in the sense that the concerns of the present are bound somehow to affect the way history is studied and written. All history is also personal, since it is impossible to avoid the influence of one's own opinions and prejudices on the selection and emphasis of one's historical material.

For myself, I would rather not write history than write it for the purpose of following the prejudices and passions of the times.Here, someone makes the Capetians descend from the Merovingians; there, someone else has it that the name very Christian has always been applied to the {French} princes.They don't form a system after reading history; they begin with the system and then search for the proofs.

Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.

Of all the great forces which have formed the past, none has disappeared more effectively, or when recalled retains less of its once compelling force, than the power of the spoken word.

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.

Universal histories teach us more about the historical crises that inspire them than they do about the civilizations they describe.

all history in some ways wishes to say something about its own present time.

History, then, is perceived as a rational process, the unfolding of a design, something with a dynamic to be uncovered.

Good historians...have the future in their bones