Great Historian Quotes

#1. I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.

Greil Marcus

#2. There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.

Rafael Sabatini

#3. To win at Augusta and to win The Open Championship at St. Andrews, it's hard to put it into words as a golfer, as an athlete, as a guy - I'm not rich in history, I can tell you that. I'm not a great historian.

Zach Johnson

#4. My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

Juan Felipe Herrera

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

Christopher Hitchens

#6. My biggest problem was to get the coaches to understand that I was a runner, and I wanted to prepare myself based upon the calisthenics I did and get myself ready. For example, I used my forearm when I ran the ball, so I didn't want to do pushups because I wanted my forearms to heal.

Jim Brown

#7. You cannot receive what you don't give.

Eckhart Tolle

#8. Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

Samuel Johnson

#9. When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.

Molly Ivins

#10. The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.

Theodore Roosevelt

#11. The future historian will rank him as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century.

{Stanton's opinion of the great Robert Ingersoll}

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#12. Once you consent to some concession, you can never cancel it and put things back the way they are.

Howard Hughes

#13. And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The same can be said about this morning's issue of The New York Times.

Kurt Vonnegut

#14. And just like that, I'd been assessed and judged. Nurse Fashoda didn't know the first thing about me but she'd taken one look at my face and now she reckoned she knew my whole life story
what had gone before and what was yet to come.

Malorie Blackman

#15. My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#16. Historian David M. Potter pointed out in 1942 that as president-elect, Lincoln was no more than "simply a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois - a man of great undeveloped capacities and narrowly limited background. He was more fit to become President than to be President.

Harold Holzer

#17. Stars don't have their own light to glint. It is supplied by sun by burning self. One endures pain for others to survive.

Sadashivan Nair

#18. My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

Ludwig Von Mises

#19. I have this theory that alpha males are actually not alpha males. They're actually very scared - particularly scared of competition from a lot of men.

Joel Edgerton

#20. Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter.

Steve Guttenberg

#21. A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

Peter Medawar

#22. A historian ought to be exact, sincere and impartial;
free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection;
and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future.

B.R. Ambedkar

#23. Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?

Joshua Foer

#24. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

Greil Marcus

#25. Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!

Nigel Hamilton

#26. With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly
through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes
one of the great political dramas of our time.

Ronald Steel

#27. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

Michael N. Castle