Top 100 Historian Quotes
#1. The only difference between the narrator of contemporary affairs and the ordinary historian is that moral judgments about the present provoke fiercer reactions and have more immediately practical implications than moral judgments about the past.
Geoffrey Barraclough
#2. Yangi, a philosopher, art historian and poet, had evolved a theory of why some objects - pots, baskets, cloth made by unknown craftsmen - were so beautiful. In his view, they expressed unconscious beauty because they had been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego.
Edmund De Waal
#3. (The historian) was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.
Sam Wineburg
#4. He doesn't have anything like wisdom of age or hindsight. He's a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.
Marc Maron
#5. An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
Agnes Repplier
#6. Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals.
James A. Haught
#7. One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany's favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.
Philip Kerr
#8. The Rebecca Riots by David Williams is an unassuming book, but its significance is universal. The book and its author determined my life; they made me want to be a historian of Wales and of the world.
Kenneth O. Morgan
#9. An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!
Philip Reeve
#10. The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.
Walter Russell Mead
#11. The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.
Austin O'Malley
#12. war historian Paul Fussell suggests that in World War II heavy drinking was the answer to fear, boredom and the terrible damage to the sense of identity experienced by so many combatants. Drunkenness, he writes, did for the men of this war what drugs did for the next generation in Vietnam.
Liz Byrski
#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. Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
#15. Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.
Ernst Junger
#16. Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.
Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier
#17. A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
Niall Ferguson
#18. I didn't realize the president was such an historian.
Mark Shields
#19. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context
Edward Hallett Carr
#20. If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.
Henri Pirenne
#21. Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
Peter Gay
#22. If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Beaumont Newhall
#23. As geology is essentially a historical science, the working method of the geologist resembles that of the historian. This makes the personality of the geologist of essential importance in the way he analyzes the past.
Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen
#24. 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
#25. All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology.
G. B. Caird
#26. The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.
Chris Hedges
#27. For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.
Stacy Schiff
#28. At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. (spoken by narrator Ava Bigtree in Swamplandia!)
Karen Russell
#29. History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
Edward Hallett Carr
#30. After acquiring Texas, Polk deliberately started a war with Mexico because, as he later told the historian George Bancroft, we had to acquire California. Thanks to Polk, we did.
Gore Vidal
#31. Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?
William Makepeace Thackeray
#32. As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.
Jim Crace
#33. The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.
James Henry Breasted
#34. The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
Henry Adams
#35. Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.
Oscar Wilde
#36. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.
Joe Scarborough
#37. The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
Walter Benjamin
#38. But this isn't human! When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You're the historian. You of all people should know that.
Junot Diaz
#39. Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking,
Robert A. Caro
#40. Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.
Samuel E. Morison
#41. That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
Julian Barnes
#42. I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
Alan Furst
#45. A historian cannot pick and choose his facts; he must deal with all the evidence.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#46. Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#47. 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
#48. Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.
Bart D. Ehrman
#49. Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
George Eliot
#50. 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
#51. It is so painful for a historian to begin his tale convinced no one will believe him, that if I thought belief had quite vanished from the face of this earth, I would leave this page blank.
Anne Gedeon LaFitte
#52. According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#53. A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
Samuel Johnson
#54. With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.
Kenneth M. Stampp
#55. The first Elizabeth film was an absolute travesty historically. It really was sloppy. Things like 'The Other Boleyn Girl' and 'The Tudors,' people's perception is distorted because of these. It matters to me as a historian, because I spend my life trying to get it right.
Alison Weir
#56. It is the historian's function, not to make us clever for the next time, but to make us wise forever.
Jacob Burckhardt
#57. It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
Beaumont Newhall
#58. 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
#59. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
Joseph Conrad
#60. Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#61. A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.
Karl Kraus
#62. As the historian Tom Standage observes, they were among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos ... . Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing.
Steven Johnson
#63. Those who are in the orbit, but nonetheless on the edges, can often be the real discoverers. It was why at times, the journalist, the historian and even the novelist paints the fullest picture of an era
Bob Woodward
#64. So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
A. B. Yehoshua
#65. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.
F.F. Bruce
#66. I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.
Dennis Prager
#67. I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
Hilary Mantel
#68. The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.
Pope Leo XIII
#69. When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
Shailer Mathews
#70. The logic behind using stone for the facing of the Empire State building seemed irrefutable, the choice of Bedford limestone inarguable. - architectural historian John Tauranac
Douglas Wissing
#71. The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
#72. What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.
James Elkins
#73. Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.
Paul Johnson
#74. I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, What happened next?
A.J.P. Taylor
#75. But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
#76. I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
Alice Dreger
#77. I don't have the education of an art historian. I've certainly read about art and look at art and have educated myself to some extent. But I'm not a skilled or thorough art historian and I wouldn't call myself an art critic.
Lynne Tillman
#78. The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
W. H. Auden
#79. The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.
Niall Ferguson
#80. The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.
Michael Korda
#81. The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
Antony Beevor
#82. Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.
Richard Marius
#83. The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.
C.V. Wedgwood
#84. I'm not a historian. I'm a politician. What is important for us is that the countries of the region and the people grow closer to each other, and that they are able to prevent aggression and injustice.
Hassan Rouhani
#85. I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.
Janet Fitch
#86. No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.
Alice Corbin Henderson
#87. What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.
Roger Kimball
#88. Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.
Robert M. Utley
#89. After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.
Ysabeau S. Wilce
#90. Despite the documented evidence by chess historian HJR Murray, I've always thought that chess was invented by a goddess
George Koltanowski
#91. The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable.
-Professor Charles Homer Haskins
Jill Lepore
#92. I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me.
Holt McCallany
#93. where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom*
*Made it up
and extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
Terry Pratchett
#94. John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
Noam Chomsky
#95. To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.
David Hume
#96. Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Herodotus
#97. [N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist ... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
Eric Hobsbawm
#98. 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.
Lytton Strachey
#99. Problems cannot all be solved, for, as they are solved, new aspects are continually revealed: the historian opens the way, he does not close it.
F. M. Powicke
#100. Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.
Samuel E. Morison
