The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the wo…

- Herbert Butterfield

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too deligh…

- Herbert Butterfield

Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years the one which seems to me to h…

- Herbert Butterfield

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

- Herbert Butterfield

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

- Herbert Butterfield

About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of m…

- Herbert Butterfield

It [the scientific revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere ep…

- Herbert Butterfield

Concerning alchemy it is more difficult to discover the actual state of things, in that the historians who specialise in this field seem sometimes to…

- Herbert Butterfield

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the stor…

- Herbert Butterfield