Making History Quotes

“Bureaucracy is built on names; knowing who everybody is and where they live and what they’ve got.”
― K.J. Parker, Making History

“consider myself, above everything else, to be a creative historian. My job, at that time, was all about changing the past, and I was very good at it. I was a coal-carver, too, except that the objects I fashioned out of my raw material were exquisite, utterly lifelike and convincing. Hence creative historian: I took a supposedly inert substance, not much use for anything except building on top of, and made it into something ductile and new; something better; something eminently useful—”
― K.J. Parker, Making History

“History is what actually happened, the true version, the truth. We believe (fondly believe) that if a thing’s true today it must have been true yesterday, and maybe even the day before. We can’t conceive of truth changing, evolving. If there’s an inconsistency between yesterday and today, such-and-such a thing can’t be the truth. It happened or it didn’t, it’s true or it’s a lie. How sweet, how touchingly naïve.”
― K.J. Parker, Making History

“Exactly the same process creates history. Each day is a leaf, another day falls on top of it, the weight of the present crushes the past into something solid, dense, rock-like. The past becomes so solid you can build on it, believing that your foundations are rock, the bones of our mother Earth. Hence the belief, so useful in my line of business, that the past is fixed, immutable. You can’t change the past, they say. History is history and ever shall be, world without end, amen.”
― K.J. Parker, Making History

“Coal, you see—not many people know this, but my colleague Professor Maniaces has proved it beyond all reasonable doubt—isn’t just ordinary rock. Actually, it’s leaves; millions and millions of leaves, fallen in drifts. Over the years millions and millions and millions of other leaves fall on top of them, until the weight squashes them together and they set like concrete, to the point where they’re easily mistaken for a type of rock. But they aren’t.”
― K.J. Parker, Making History