Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

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

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.

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.

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

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

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.

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

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

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 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 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 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.

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.