Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

Heart and head are contrary historians.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

I can see that you [Bruce Cole] are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

I'm a historian, I think history matters, but we don't have to be slavish in following it and restoring it.

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong in the latter camp.

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.

It has always been difficult for historians to fully grasp the intelligence of painters.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.

The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.

[T]he historian and the detective have much in common.

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

The darkness, of which the historians complain, is essentially the darkness of their own ignorance.