Best 115 quotes in «historian quotes» category

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

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.

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

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

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

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

In a certain sense all men are historians.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis

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.

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

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.

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

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

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

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

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

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.

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

[T]he historian and the detective have much in common.

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

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

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

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

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 historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

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?

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

A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

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.