Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

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

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

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

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

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

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.

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

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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 lays humanity on the couch.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

A society that has no respect, no regard for its bards, its historians, its storytellers, is a society in steep decline, a society that has lost its very soul and may never find its way.

Historians conquer the past, not the future. (Les historiens conquièrent - Le passé, non l'avenir)

...history is inherently an eclectic discipline and the skills it requires are correspondingly diverse. And therein lie its strengths. Eclecticism is sometimes treated as a dirty word. At the very least it sounds untidy - just so: if historians treat the past in too tidy a manner they lose a great deal...It is precisely the ability to embrace complexities while making sense of them, and to think flexibly about diverse phenomena at distinct analytical levels, that characterises historians' purchase on the past.

History is rich knowledge. In your travel, learn brief history of the place visited.

You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.

...history is, as R.G. Collingwood suggested, a re-enactment of the past in the mind of the historian...

History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.

History is rich knowledge, In your travel, learn the brief history of the place visited. .

History and man made each other.

Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression. The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion. This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man. Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective. His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy. Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind -- exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.

I felt a tightening in my chest, a sharp spike of intense sadness-almost like nostalgia, except it was for a life I never had.

Looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We are all vulnerable.

The future historian will rank him as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century. {Stanton's opinion of the great Robert Ingersoll}

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading. For one thing, the careers of the famous and the merely ordinary fall into much the same pattern, give or take an honorary degree or two, or (in European countries) an honorific order. It could be hardly otherwise. Academics can only seldom lead lives that are spacious or exciting in a worldly sense. They need laboratories or libraries and the company of other academics. Their work is in no way made deeper or more cogent by privation, distress or worldly buffetings. Their private lives may be unhappy, strangely mixed up or comic, but not in ways that tell us anything special about the nature or direction of their work. Academics lie outside the devastation area of the literary convention according to which the lives of artists and men of letters are intrinsically interesting, a source of cultural insight in themselves. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility; if a historian were to fail (as Ruskin did) to consummate his marriage, we should not suppose that our understanding of historical scholarship had somehow been enriched.

The past is the occupational realm of historians—their daily work—and scholars have debated what their stance toward these social issues should be. As citizens and professionals, historians may naturally form a desire, as Carl Becker puts it, “to do work in the world.” That is, they might aspire to write history that is not only of scholarly value but also has a salutary impact in society. Becker defines the appropriate impact and the historian’s proper role as “correcting and rationalizing for common use Mr. Everyman’s mythological adaption of what actually happened.” That process is never simple, however, when the subject involves divisions so deep that they led to civil wars. One issue that inevitably leads to controversy is the extent to which history involves moral judgment. Another is the power of myths, exerting their influence on society and acting in opposition to the findings of historical research [190—91].

What is deemed as “his-story” is often determined by those who survived to write it. In other words, history is written by the victors...Now, with the help of the Roman historian Tacitus, I shall tell you Queen Boudicca’s story, her-story……