E. H. Carr Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural processes – the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span – but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence.

E. H. Carr
What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

E. H. Carr
Your life has found its goal, its destiny; your life has fulfilled its circuit of the earth.

E. H. Carr
May yours be the happiness! I shall be content if I see you happy, or if I die at your side on the barricades.

E. H. Carr
Ogarev had never enjoyed happiness in love. And if his earlier, and far more promising, dreams of happiness had proved to be no more than vain and embittering illusions, what guarantee had he that this new dream would not crumble to dust when he tried to handle and grasp it?

E. H. Carr
For, while Rosa Luxemburg reached early in life an intellectual conviction that revolution was necessary and justifiable, and acted on that conviction throughout her career, she never fully faced the element of ruthlessness which seems to enter into every revolution in action.

E. H. Carr
The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context

E. H. Carr
Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

E. H. Carr