E.h. Carr Quotes

The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.

We view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present

Man’s capacity to rise above his social and historical situation seems to be conditioned by the sensitivity with which he recognizes the extent of his involvement in it.

History is movement; and movement implies comparison.

The desire to postulate individual genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of historical consciousness.

When I was very young, I was suitably impressed to learn that, appearances notwithstanding, the whale is not a fish. Nowadays these questions of classification move me less; and it does not worry me unduly when I am assured that history is not a science. This terminological question is an eccentricity of the English language. In every other European language, the equivalent word to ‘science’ includes history without hesitation.

[...] the real importance of the Darwinian revolution was that Darwin, completing what Lyell had already begun in geology, brought history into science.

The other day I was shocked to come across, I think, the only remark of Bertrand Russell I have ever seen which seemed to me to betray an acute sense of class: ‘There is, on the whole, much less liberty in the world now than there was a hundred years ago.’ I have no measuring-rod for liberty, and do not know how to balance the lesser liberty of few against the greater liberty of many. But on any standard of measurement I can only regard the statement as fantastically untrue.