Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

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

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

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

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

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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

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

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

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 passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.

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

...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.