Top 100 Quotes About Historians
#1. Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
Stewart Brand
#2. History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
[1880]
Max Beerbohm
#3. There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.
Alan Dean Foster
#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. I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits ... If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth, and in hell, according to these historians, though, like Pascal, true Catholics, it is this company of Loyolas.
John Adams
#7. Americans tend to use "nation" as a synonym for "country." But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people who feel they belong together, whether they have a country of their own or not.
Robert Lane Greene
#8. When we see the human race, we must see before all else environment and food. Historians write about social change without taking these factors into account. This is why it is difficult for them to see the reasons decline and prosperity in society.
Michio Kushi
#9. 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
#10. Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.
Brent Staples
#11. 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
#12. I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.
Lauren Willig
#14. Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
Alice Dreger
#15. A society that has no respect, no regard for its bards, its historians, its storytellers, is a society in steep decline, a society that has lost its very soul and may never find its way.
Laurence Overmire
#16. Few American presidents are held in higher esteem than Thomas Jefferson. Though historians have scrutinized every phase of his long public career and found him wanting in a number of respects, he holds an unshakable place in the pantheon of American heroes.
Robert Dallek
#18. Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.
Spencer Abraham
#19. Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.
Winston Churchill
#20. The only result of a horse race which historians can tell us with absolute confidence is one that has already been run.
Eric Hobsbawm
#21. The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding.
Albion W. Small
#22. Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
#23. In Africa I discovered what the true purpose of a musician is. We are historians, and it is our purpose to tell the people the true story of our past, and to extend a better vision of the future.
Randy Weston
#24. 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
#25. Historians of European royalty have written of the king's 'two bodies' : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#27. All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men.
J. A. Spender
#28. Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
Thomas Frank
#29. Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see decline of empire.
Jim Cooper
#30. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#31. 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
#32. History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.
Esther M. Friesner
#33. 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
#34. I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.
Steven Spielberg
#35. Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
Bill Moyers
#36. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled memories.
Kate Morton
#37. 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
#38. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not.
Mary Beard
#39. Historians in England will say I am a liar. But history is written by those who have hanged heroes.
Robert The Bruce
#40. I retained no records and I am not a good writer anyhow. So the best approach is for historians like you to extract the facts directly from people like me.
Shunroku Hata
#41. 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
#42. History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.
Donald Kagan
#43. 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
#44. You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
A.S. Byatt
#45. Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
Robertson Davies
#46. Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.
Richard Ellmann
#47. Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.
Isaac Asimov
#48. When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would use).
Paulo Coelho
#49. Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.
Gary Krist
#50. I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
Sherman Alexie
#51. 2011 is one of those years that historians are likely to look back on as a 'hinge.' And the truth, at once frightening and exhilarating, is that we don't know yet which way the door will swing.
David Ignatius
#52. History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
#53. The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion.
Edward Gibbon
#54. In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#55. The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.
Michel De Montaigne
#56. Sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late
G.K. Chesterton
#57. Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#58. While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
Colm Toibin
#59. Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.
Kenneth Baker
#60. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
Tansy Rayner Roberts
#61. God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
Samuel Butler
#62. Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!
Mark Mason
#63. 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
#64. We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
Adrienne Rich
#65. History never repeats itself, historians do.
Lee Benson
#66. History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.
C.V. Wedgwood
#67. 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
#68. Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems.
Aly Khan
#69. The reason I put so much energy into it at the beginning was that while there were plenty of people looking after the talkies, almost nobody was doing the same for the silents. Now there are plenty of very good historians and restorers.
Kevin Brownlow
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
Edmond De Goncourt
#73. 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
#74. When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously.
Huston Smith
#75. When you educate yourself about clitoredectomies, infibulation, forced prostitution, rape as a war tactic, patriarchal religions, women painters, filmmakers, poets, writers, activists, politicians, sex-industry workers, historians, archelogoists and musicians, that's self-protection.
Inga Muscio
#76. World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
Richard Holbrooke
#77. In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
Mark Twain
#78. There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign.
Peter Kreeft
#79. As [ale] is the liquor of modern historians, ... , it ought likewise to be the potation of their readers, since every book ought to be read with the same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ.
Henry Fielding
#80. When historians consider the significance of the Berlin crises of the mid-20th century, I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view, in my judgment, will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism.
Robert Kennedy
#81. Our journey is one of discovery on Sicily.
Like the past Greek writers.orators,historians and philosophers we are all searching for answers on Earth
Daniel Peter Buckley
#83. The withdrawal of more than half a million Russian troops and dependents from Germany since 1991 is described by historians as 'the biggest pullout ever by an army not defeated in battle.'
Stephen Kinzer
#84. Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
David Christian
#85. Mr. Ford's decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency.
Scott Shane
#86. Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.
Richard Perle
#87. When we're trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a word for this: diplomacy.
Madeleine Albright
#88. Harold, according to some historians, crowned himself with his own hand, without any religious ceremony; and renewing in his heart the ancient spirit of his ancestors, he conceived a hatred for Christianity.
Augustin Thierry
#89. The historians criticized a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.
Andre Gide
#90. From time to time historians need to be shocked.
Peter Burke
#92. I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
Ron Chernow
#93. Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory ...
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#94. I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.
Antony Beevor
#95. In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.
Kate Morton
#96. Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.
Stephen Kinzer
#97. We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.
Erik Erikson
#98. 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
#99. History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won't, because most historians are on the left.
Richard M. Nixon
#100. I have made a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human.
George W. Bush
