Adam Hochschild

“For me, the historian's job is not to be a prosecutor or a judge, but to be a storyteller, to try to get you to feel what it was like to be alive at some other time.”

“All any of us can do is to say, 'This is how I see it,' and stand by the record. An historian is not a prophet.”

“Every country has its sacred cows. In the United States, the most sacred of all is the story of its own virtue.”

“The world we live in is a world of mingled good and evil. Whether it is chiefly good or chiefly bad depends on how we take it.”

“Forgetting is a crucial part of the process of remembering.”

“Of all the parts of the human body, the one that is hardest to change is the human heart.”

“But the past is not dead; it is not even past. It is a living thing that is part of us now.”

“The colonial world was a world of masters and servants, of the subhuman and the human, of justice for the white man and injustice for the black.”

“You can't write about the past without being shaped by the present.”

“The silence of the archives can be as eloquent as the words.”

“Slavery is a form of parasitism, and for a parasite to thrive, its host must be kept alive.”

“History is not a science; it is an art. You can't prove a historical fact in the same way you can prove a scientific one.”

“There's a reason we are drawn to stories of injustice: we want to believe that we would have been on the right side.”