"HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.
This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.)
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality);
and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories — when they "Platonify.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

So hard is it to discover the truth, because the history of past ages is rendered difficult by the lapse of time; while in contemporary history the truth is always obscured, either by private spite and hatred, or by a desire to curry favour with the chief men of the time.

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

History is a sequence of random events and unpredictable choices, which is why the future is so difficult to foresee.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.