Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.

Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

A historian has many duties... the first is not to slander; the second is not to bore

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

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……

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

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

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

Anne Romaine [ is ]folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field [of Malcolm X].

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

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

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

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

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

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.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

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?

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Heart and head are contrary historians.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

In a certain sense all men are historians.