Top 100 Historian Quotes
#1. Environmental history ... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat ... The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.
Roderick Nash
#2. The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#3. 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
#4. 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.
Miguel De Cervantes
#6. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#7. The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.
Simon Schama
#8. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...
A.S. Byatt
#9. The historian must have no country. - JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
James W. Loewen
#10. I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#11. History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.
William L. Shirer
#12. The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.
Marc Bloch
#13. Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#14. I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition!
Galileo Galilei
#17. As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.
Pete Hamill
#18. I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis
Antony Beevor
#19. George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with
Justin Spring
#20. The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
Howard Nemerov
#21. The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.
Peter Conrad
#22. People instinctively turn to the past to understand the present. But the questions the historian asks are given to him or her by the world they live in.
Eric Foner
#23. I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Penelope Lively
#24. One can evade a danger that one recognizes,' wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, 'but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.
Erik Larson
#25. A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.
Karl Kraus
#26. The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#27. I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.
H.G.Wells
#28. The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E.L. Doctorow
#29. History is too important to be left to the historians.
Robert Harris
#30. But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
Oliver Stone
#31. As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.
Christina Romer
#32. 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
#33. The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#34. 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
#35. The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.
Geoffrey Nunberg
#36. In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin.
Catharine Arnold
#37. 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
#38. I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.
Oliver Stone
#39. It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#40. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. - historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle
Carol Tavris
#41. A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life ... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized.
Ralph Davis
#42. What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
Barbara Tuchman
#43. Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#44. If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
Matthew Arnold
#45. We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#48. The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.
Ernst Junger
#49. The long historian of my country's woes.
Homer
#50. I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.
Rick Perlstein
#51. The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Stendhal
#52. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.
Howard Zinn
#53. I'm not a historian, and I wouldn't want to be. I want to change the world. Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my stories and you'll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power. The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always will.
Terry Deary
#54. I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write ...
Wilhelm Steinitz
#55. My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.
Rick Perlstein
#56. The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
#57. J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay "The Necessity for Ruins." Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption.
Thomas Moore
#58. It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray ... We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.
Winston Churchill
#59. As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.
Deborah Harkness
#60. The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying.
David Eagleman
#61. She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
Robert K. Massie
#63. The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.
Jules Michelet
#64. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#65. What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#66. In 1970, Danvers town historian Richard B. Trask asked the property owners, Alfred and Edie Anne Hutchinson, for permission to do an archaeological dig there.
Rosemary Ellen Guiley
#67. It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.
John Hope Franklin
#68. The historian in me love to uncover things, and the mother in me hates to be lied to...[Why Dotsy investigates murder]
Maria Hudgins
#69. Those who read the fiction assume that, because I'm also a historian, I know what I'm talking about.
Saul David
#70. For heroes do not make history - that is the historian's job - but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.
Erwin Panofsky
#72. No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.
James Harrington
#74. The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
E. M. Forster
#75. Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. I'm not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.
Douglas Brinkley
#77. Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.
Samuel E. Morison
#79. If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.
Geoffrey Elton
#80. A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell.
Victor Hugo
#81. These exchanges are reported without comment by the East Roman historian Theophylact Simocatta (charmingly, his surname means 'the one-eyed cat').
Peter Heather
#82. I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.
Peter Berg
#83. ... those were the subjects that Barber dealt with as a historian, and no matter how scrupulous and profession he was in treating them, there was always a personal motive behind his work, a secret conviction that he was somehow digging into the mysteries of his own life.
Paul Auster
#84. The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.
Herbert Butterfield
#85. We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.
Sophie Swetchine
#86. David Irving is not just a Fascist historian . He is also a great historian of Fascism .
Christopher Hitchens
#87. The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#88. I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#89. When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.
C.L.R. James
#90. In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!
Bart D. Ehrman
#91. History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.
Timothy George
#92. As the primary end of History is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an Historian.
Hugh Blair
#93. 'Know,' says a wise writer, the historian of kings, 'Know the men that are to be trusted'; but how is this to be? The possession of knowledge involves both time and opportunities. Neither of these are 'handservants at command.'
Dorothea Dix
#94. 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.
D. James Kennedy
#95. When historian of science Naomi Oreskes surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world's leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it.
Donald R. Prothero
#97. Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.
Adam Hochschild
#98. The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.
James Joll
#99. If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
Pierre Bayle
#100. There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.
Donald Worster
