Hugh Trevor-Roper Quotes

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Any reaction which is to be successful over a long period must have radical origins…A reaction which is to last, which is to be accepted as orthodoxy over several generations, must spring out of the same social circumstances as the progress which it resists.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Those who exercise power and determine policy are generally men whose minds have been formed by events twenty or thirty years before.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background - the controlling background - of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

How are we to disentangle religion from politics in a revolution? Religion may form the outlook of an individual. It may serve as an ideological intoxicant for a crowd.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Trevor-Roper

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Born: January 15, 1914

Died: January 26, 2003 (aged 89)

Bio: Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was a historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.

Known for:

The Last Days of Hitler (1947)
Renaissance essays (1985)
The Wartime Journals
The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History

Hugh Trevor-Roper on Wikipedia

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