“The History Boys” quotes

“This is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters.”
Stephen Campbell Moore - Tom Irwing

- Hector: "Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters; enough their simple loveliness for me". Keats.
- Crowther: Oh! We won't be examined on that, though, will we, sir?
- Hector: Keats?
- Crowther: Happiness.
Richard Griffiths - Hector
Samuel Anderson - Crowther

“- Timms: I don't always understand poetry!
- Hector: You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it... whenever.”
James Corden - Timms
Richard Griffiths - Hector

“- Dakin: Lecher though one is, or aspires to be, it occurs to me that the lot of women cannot be easy, who must suffer such inexpert male fumblings, virtually on a daily basis. Are we scarred for life, do you think?
- Scripps: We must hope so.”

Dominic Cooper - Dankin
Jamie Parker - Scripps

“Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.”
Stephen Campbell Moore - Tom Irwing

“Can you, for a moment, imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?”
Frances de la Tour - Mrs. Lintott

“The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn't want war. Yeah, there's an arms race, but it's Britain who's leading it. So, why does no one admit this?”
Stephen Campbell Moore - Tom Irwing

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something, a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things, that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
Richard Griffiths - Hector

“One of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.”
Stephen Campbell Moore - Tom Irwing

“there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”
Stephen Campbell Moore - Tom Irwing

“If it can be explained that it can be explained away.”

Samuel Barnett - Posner

We don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning's veiled the truth. It's not "lest we forget", it's "lest we remember".

Stephen Campbell Moore - Tom Irwing

“- Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.
- Scripps: No.
- Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.”
Dominic Cooper - Dankin
Jamie Parker - Scripps

“Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.”
Richard Griffiths - Hector