every historian is the obedient servant of his or her own point of view

--- Paul Cartledge, quoting "a famous Dutch historian," speaking on a BBC4 episode of In Our Time on The Mytilenaean Debate, 20 Jun 2019, starting timecode 26:40

In context:

A famous Dutch historian once said that the historian -- every  historian -- is the obedient servant of his or her own point of view. So it is the historian who selects what episodes, what  events -- it's the historian who chooses what to sources he  or she will accept and it's the historian who, as Thucydides says in his very first sentence, writes the war.