Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.

541-550 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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541) History is what one makes of it. History is merely a related story, a child's game of "telephone." (Jillian Brady, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #541]

542) The past is always being learned. (Jillian Brady, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #547]

543) The playwright's chief stock in trade is feelings, not facts. When he writes of a subject out of history, or out of today's news, he cannot be a scholarly recorder or a good reporter; he is, at best, an interpreter, with a certain facility for translating all that he has heard in a manner sufficiently dramatic to attract a crowd. He has been granted, by a tradition that goes back to the King of Thebes, considerable poetic license to distort and embellish the truth; and he generally takes advantage of far more license than he has been granted. The Cleopatra who actually existed may have borne no resemblance to the Cleopatra of Shakespeare's creation nor to the entirely different one of Shaw's, but no one now cares about that, even in Egypt. (Robert E. Sherwood) [SoundBite #543]

544) I say it is a moral duty for even filmmakers to be accurate because, otherwise, they contribute to the stupification of America -- because I'm pretty certain that the majority of the public will not try to expand their knowledge -- or check facts -- after seeing a film. (Amy Burchard, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #544]

545) It may be that sometime we will have a Lincoln drama employing entirely speeches and situations authenticated by documents and evidence, but whether it will be a drama that people will go and see and value as drama is another question. (Carl Sandburg) [SoundBite #545]

546) There's only one thing worse than tradition and that's believing in it. (Philip Moeller) [SoundBite #546]

547) The historical film, like the mythic figure of Janus, looks both to the past and the present. . . . Like a hologram, it appears to contain two perspectives, two vantage points on the past in a single form. (Robert Burgoyne 11) [SoundBite #1377]

548) The facts of history are bad enough; the fictions are, if possible, worse. (Henry James) [SoundBite #548]

549) It has been said that the history of any nation begins with myth. When the age of reflection arrives and the nation begins to speculate on its origin, it has no more recollection on what happened in its infancy than a man has of what happened to him in his cradle. (Alexander Brown) [SoundBite #549]

550) First, and if not most important, then, most elementary, history is a story. That was its original character, and that has continued to be its most distinctive character. If history forgets or neglects to tell a story, it will inevitably forfeit much of its appeal and much of its authority as well. With the Iliad and the Odyssey story-telling and history are so inextricably co-mingled that we do not know to this day whether to classify them as literature or as history; they are of course both. (Henry Steele Commager 3) [SoundBite #34]