G. M. Trevelyan - History Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

View all G. M. Trevelyan Quotes
Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

G. M. Trevelyan
Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

G. M. Trevelyan
The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

G. M. Trevelyan
The year 1848 was the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.

G. M. Trevelyan
And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.

G. M. Trevelyan
Man's evolution is far more extraordinary than the first chapter of Genesis used to lead people to suppose. Man's history, pre-history, ancient, medieval and modern, is by far the most wonderful thing in the Universe [about] which any news has come through to us.

G. M. Trevelyan
If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me!

G. M. Trevelyan
History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

G. M. Trevelyan