The Whig Interpretation of History Quotes

“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, The Whig Interpretation of History

“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, The Whig Interpretation of History

“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“If history could be told in all its complexity and detail it would provide us with something as chaotic and baffling as life itself...”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

“But the true historical fervour is the love of the past for the sake of the past… And behind it is the very passion to understand men in their diversity, the desire to study a bygone age in the things in which it differs from the present. The true historical fervour is that of the man for whom the exercise of historical imagination brings its own reward, in those inklings of a deeper understanding, those glimpses of a new interpretative truth, which are the historian’s achievement and his aesthetic delight”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History