History Boys

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.

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Hector: 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.

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Mrs. Lintott: History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

...

Mrs. Lintott: Can you, for a moment, imagine how dispiriting it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?

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Tom Irwin: But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. 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. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

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Hector: The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

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Mrs. Lintott: And you, Rudge? How do you define history?
Rudge: Can I speak freely without being hit?
Mrs. Lintott: You have my protection.
Rudge: How do I define history? Well it's just one fucking thing after another, isn't it?

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[Posner has confessed to Irwin that he thinks he is homosexual and in love with Dakin]
Posner: Do you ever look at your life?
Tom Irwin: I thought everybody did.
Posner: I'm a Jew... I'm small... I'm homosexual... and I live in Sheffield.
[pause]
Posner: I'm fucked.