Top 100 History Historians Quotes
#1. Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
Simon Schama
#2. There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.
John Dominic Crossan
#3. History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
[1880]
Max Beerbohm
#4. Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
Bruce Jackson
#5. History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone's heritage." Captain Hank Bracker. This quote is from the flyleaf of the award winning book "The Exciting Story of Cuba.
Hank Bracker
#6. The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
Tom Hayden
#7. Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.
Brent Staples
#8. It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.
Adam Gopnik
#11. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.
John Henrik Clarke
#13. It is also said that history is written by the victors. This was particularly true in the Old Realm, where the official historians at the Library of Avaress had been required for centuries to be named Victor.
Robert Kroese
#14. It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#15. Historians in England will say I am a liar. But history is written by those who have hanged heroes.
Robert The Bruce
#16. When we approach the Bible as history and biography, we approach the Bible in the wrong spirit. We must read the Bible, not primarily as historians seeking information, but as men and women seeking God.
Billy Graham
#17. History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.
Donald Kagan
#18. At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.
Paul Johnson
#19. Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.
Richard Ellmann
#20. History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
Colum McCann
#24. We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.
Erik Erikson
#25. History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won't, because most historians are on the left.
Richard M. Nixon
#26. For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.
Hilary Mantel
#27. Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense.
J. Christopher Herold
#28. History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
Ridley Scott
#29. Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians
Terry Pratchett
#30. The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians ...
Barbara Tuchman
#31. 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
#32. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.
E.H. Carr
#33. Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.
Joseph J. Ellis
#34. History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
Max Beerbohm
#35. The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
#36. The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".
Herbert Butterfield
#38. There is no history without historians." The buzz ended. "Nothing happened unless some historian said it happened.
Harlan Hague
#39. It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can
it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
#40. Kirkus Star Review stated of Behind the Lines: "An excellent history that should catapult Miller to the top tier of popular historians.
Jeffrey B. Miller
#41. History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
Ferdinand Marcos
#42. 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
#43. A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.
C.V. Wedgwood
#45. If this works, it' going to be one of those things that get written down in the history books. He wondered, briefly, what he should say. Oh well. I can always think of something clever later to tell the historians.
"Come on!" He chopped downward, toward the enemy. "Let's get the bastards!
Django Wexler
#46. Too many so-called historians are really 'hysterians'; their thinking is more visceral than cerebral. When their duties as citizens clash with their responsibilities as scholars, Clio frequently takes a back seat.
Thomas A. Bailey
#47. Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
Konrad Lorenz
#48. as is done by the newest historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not the history of the life of the peoples.
Leo Tolstoy
#49. Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.
Cheikh Anta Diop
#50. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history.
Teju Cole
#51. The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Ernest Renan
#52. History does not have sides, although historians do.
Jay Nordlinger
#53. I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.
Hampton Sides
#54. 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
#55. As is always the case, events do not conform easily to the generalizations historians produce to try to make sense of the past.
Glenn Porter
#56. Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations ... "and it is on these that history is built.
Lloyd DeMause
#57. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.
Erich Auerbach
#58. My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.
Shinzo Abe
#59. It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between
the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some
fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
Norman Davies
#60. No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for Before Coffee.
Cherise Sinclair
#61. Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.
Elizabeth Kostova
#62. All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
Carl Lotus Becker
#63. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
Edmund Morgan
#64. Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.
Victor Davis Hanson
#65. You know, this is such a rich time that we've just been involved in, and there's really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it's important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.
Dennis Hopper
#66. The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.
Gary DeMar
#67. There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.
Gloria Naylor
#68. Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are - honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#70. Studying history is for tourists - polite, tidy people with clean desks and clean consciences. Making history is for people willing to get their hands dirty, to make mistake and lie when necessary, so that someday historians can sit quietly at their desks and act shocked.
Robert Ferrigno
#71. That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.
Josephine Tey
#72. I do not approve of naval historians who seek out flaws in the losers' battle plans and tactics. The way to profit from history is to put oneself in the shoes of the tactical decision maker as he confronts a many-faceted problem in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
Wayne Hughes
#74. Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.
Peter Earle
#75. Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.
George W. Bush
#77. He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.
Boris Johnson
#78. Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.
G. M. Trevelyan
#79. Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.
Terry Pratchett
#80. Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
David Christian
#81. The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.
Michel De Montaigne
#82. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.
Tony Kushner
#83. History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.
G. M. Trevelyan
#84. 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
#85. I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.
John Cusack
#86. Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.
Malcolm Gladwell
#87. How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.
Andre Aciman
#88. Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,
the every-day life of each particular time and country.
Richard Whately
#89. Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
Alice Dreger
#90. 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
#91. You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".
John Hodgman
#92. History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.
Lillian Hellman
#93. In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.
James Henry Breasted
#94. Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and
Shashi Tharoor
#95. He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.
Johnny Rich
#96. Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.
Christopher Hill
#97. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
Peter Greenaway
#98. Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.
Benjamin Franklin
#99. The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.
Marvin Perry
#100. 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
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