Paul Veyne

Paul Veyne (13 June 1930 – 29 September 2022) was a French archaeologist and historian.

Quotes

• The course of history does not include eternal problems, problems of essences or of dialectics; it only offers valorizations that differ from one culture to another and even from one individual to another. ... What is opposed to time as well as eternity is our own valorization of the present. What does it matter that time passes and that its frontier wipes out our valorizations? No warrior has been shaken in his patriotism by the idea that, had he been born on the other side of the border, his heart would have beaten for the other side.
  • "The Final Foucault and His Ethics", translated by Catherine Porter and Arnold I. Davidson, Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 1 (Autumn, 1993), p. 2

• L'histoire est anecdotique: elle intéresse
  en racontant, comme le roman.
  • Comment on écrit l'histoire (1971), p. 23. Quoted as an epigraph in Malina Stefanovska, "Exemplary or Singular? The Anecdote in Historical Narrative", SubStance, vol. 38, no. 1 (2009), p. 16