Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

Despite the documented evidence by chess historian HJR Murray, I've always thought that chess was invented by a goddess

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

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

Heart and head are contrary historians.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

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.

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?

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

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

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

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.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

In a certain sense all men are historians.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.