Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

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.

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

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

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

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

History and man made each other.

A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.

...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.

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. .

It’s the reward of the business (historian), to look history in the eye & say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me.

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.

If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was.

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

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

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

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.