Herbert Butterfield Quotes

In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. 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.

While there is battle and hatred men have eyes for nothing save the fact that the enemy is the cause of all the troubles; but long, long afterwards, when all passion has been spent, the historian often sees that it was a conflict between one half-right that was perhaps too proud; and behind even this he discerns that it was a terrible predicament, which had the effect of putting men so at cross-purposes with one another.

Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain, unless one can. do big things.

About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".

It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent.

Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion.

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

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.

[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.

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".

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.