Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

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

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.

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

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

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.

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

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.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

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

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

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 first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

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

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

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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. .

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.

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

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

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

History and man made each other.

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.

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.

No historian should be a nationalist. Nationalism consequently leads to the delusion and mystification of the historical facts, consciously or unconsciously, in favour of national interests, which in turn makes history basically a subjective vision system.

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.