Great Historians Sayings

#1. Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.

Robert Dallek

#2. Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

Walter Savage Landor

#3. If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.

Mary Karr

#4. Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

Miguel De Cervantes

#5. I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair

Pablo Neruda

#6. Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.

Gregory David Roberts

#7. As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.

Thomas Frank

#8. I'm not psychic, but my lyrics are.

Courtney Love

#9. Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

Michio Kaku

#10. Life's not a video game, Felix- there aren't a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.

Zadie Smith

#11. Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Frank Herbert

#12. Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

Billy Collins

#13. The more I had to act like a saint, the more I felt like being a sinner.

Max Von Sydow

#14. The lives of heroes have enriched history, and history has adorned the actions of heroes ; and thus I cannot say whether the historians are more indebted to those who provided them with such noble materials, or those great men to their historians.

Jean De La Bruyere

#15. I was trying to find a reason for having had to escape from the place that was my home. To convince myself of my choices, I had to make it a place that everyone should want to escape from.

Portia De Rossi

#16. Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due.

Jon Stewart

#17. Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Johan Huizinga

#18. 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

#19. If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

Simone De Beauvoir

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

Margaret Atwood

#21. Weight loss can change your whole character. That always amazed me: Shedding pounds does change your personality. It changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body.

Jean Nidetch

#22. There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.

Antony Beevor

#23. A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

Edmund Phelps

#24. I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#25. I don't think that boxing historians have been able to find a case in which a great fighter, or a fighter presumed to be a great fighter, came to such an ignominious end.

Larry Merchant

#26. Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America - historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

David Hoffman

#27. Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission
it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

Fareed Zakaria

#28. It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

Peter Ackroyd

#29. Some historians, in fact, suggest Hartford recruiters may have pioneered strategies that spurred the great migration of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities.

Susan Eaton

#30. 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

#31. For over two centuries (or so historians tell us), it was from the St. Petersburg salons that our country's culture advanced. From those great rooms overlooking the Fontanka Canal, new cuisines, fashions, and ideas all took their first tentative steps into Russian society.

Amor Towles

#32. The more I know about people, the more I love zombies.

J.J. Zep

#33. If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#34. There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

Rick Atkinson