All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

Carl Lotus Becker
About This Quote

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind. All writing about the past is written by one person’s point of view. The author has to interpret history for his or her own generation. This quote fits perfectly with my essay topic “Why is history so important?” because it shows that all historical writings are biased. Furthermore, it shows how each person is imprisoned by their own time period and place in history.

Source: The Heavenly City Of The Eighteenth Century Philosophers

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More Quotes By Carl Lotus Becker
  1. Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.
  2. Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.
  3. Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.
  4. Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.
  5. All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
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