Top 100 Quotes About Historians
#1. Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.
Miguel De Cervantes
#2. We've become so used to the idea of the flu - it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it? - that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.
Stephen King
#3. Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#4. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
Saul David
#5. Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
Marshall McLuhan
#6. Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.
Thomas Keneally
#7. 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
#8. The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.
James Lee Burke
#9. So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres.
Wislawa Szymborska
#10. Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
Elizabeth Bishop
#12. We will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.
Albert Einstein
#13. Future historians will be able to study at the Jimmy Carter Library, the Gerald Ford Library, the Ronald Reagan Library, and the Bill Clinton Adult Bookstore.
George Carlin
#14. Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.
Richard Dawkins
#15. 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
#16. Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.
George W. Bush
#17. In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.
Megan Smolenyak
#18. It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.
Chuck Close
#19. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
Barry Unsworth
#20. 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
#22. Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed.
Graham Stanton
#23. History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.
John H. Arnold
#24. There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.
Glen Cook
#25. Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything.
Stephen King
#26. Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.
Barbara Tuchman
#27. Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.
J.I. Packer
#28. 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
#29. Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.
Walter Raleigh
#30. As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.
Kate Williams
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.
Thomas Szasz
#35. Some historians trace the start of the War on Terror to November 4, 1979, the day the hostages were taken in Tehran.
Stephen Rodrick
#36. A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Henry Adams
#37. History is too important to be left to the historians.
Robert Harris
#38. Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#39. My basic notion regarding the matter of historical recognition is basically, it's a matter that should be left to the good hands of historians and experts.
Shinzo Abe
#40. Historians will remember the first year of Microsoft Windows 10 for its willful vandalism of many computers through the release of a flawed operating system (OS) and mandatory flaky automatic updates.
Steven Magee
#41. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Margaret Atwood
#42. The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages.
William Blake
#43. 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
#44. If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.
David Christian
#45. 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
#46. The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.
David Levering Lewis
#47. 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
#48. America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.
Bill Nye
#49. So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.
Nancy Horan
#50. 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
#51. It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself
which is what they are most needed for.
Rudolf Arnheim
#52. Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.
Janette Turner Hospital
#53. Laozi was an ancient Chinese philosopher. According to Chinese tradition, Laozi lived in the 6th century BC, however many historians contend that Laozi
Lao-Tzu
#54. Sallust is indisputably one of the best historians among the Romans, both for the purity of his language and the elegance of his style.
Edmund Burke
#55. Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not.
Mark Bowden
#56. The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Ernest Renan
#57. The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
Clifford Geertz
#58. Oman's book Wellington's Army is 400 pages in length but just a single page is devoted to the artillery with the opening, 'only a short note is required as to Wellington's use of artillery'. Historians ever since
Nick Lipscombe
#59. Artists are the emotional historians of the world.
Richard Blanco
#60. 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
#61. The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men.
John Aubrey
#62. In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.
David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech
#63. Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
Josef Albers
#64. The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?
Leon Wieseltier
#65. Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the
Malcolm Gladwell
#66. Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.
Robert Black
#67. You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.
Dougray Scott
#68. Historians need to treat a participant's own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect.
Julian Barnes
#69. 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
#70. Social historians of the future no doubt will be amused by the fact that we late-twentieth-century Americans found it acceptable to discuss publicly in detail the most intimate aspects of personal life, while maintaining an almost prudish reserve concerning the political significance of family life.
Mary Ann Glendon
#71. 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
#72. No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied ... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers.
Heinrich Schliemann
#73. Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.
Kitty Kelley
#74. No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for Before Coffee.
Cherise Sinclair
#75. Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.
Edmund Morgan
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
Richard Dawkins
#79. Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
F. Sionil Jose
#80. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
#81. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.
Erich Auerbach
#82. Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.
Gilbert Gottfried
#83. 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
#84. In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.
Miriam Makeba
#85. 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
#86. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#87. These muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time trouble was discovered and battles started pre-erupting hundred of years before the issues even arose.
Douglas Adams
#88. 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
#89. If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.
Geoffrey Elton
#90. 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
#91. The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#92. Science will ... produce the data ... , but never the
full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we
shall need ... most of all the brains of poets, [and]
also those of artists, musicians, philosophers,
historians, writers in general.
Lewis Thomas
#93. This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.
Orson Scott Card
#94. Markham even had our banners ready. The polite NON AD CAPITAGIUM (No to the poll tax), the hopeful MAGIS STIPENDIUM HISTORICI (More money for historians) and the always accurate POLICITI NOSTRAE OMNEC WANKERS SUNT (Most politicians are not very good).
Jodi Taylor
#95. We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.
Sophie Swetchine
#96. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
Eric Hobsbawm
#97. When historians look at the Obama presidency, they're likely to credit him especially for doing the politically unpopular things that were needed in 2009 to salvage the financial wreckage.
David Ignatius
#98. Historians evaluating George W. Bush's first term will focus on foreign policy and, most of all, 9/11. I think they will criticize him for his early reaction, for not returning at once to Washington, D.C.
Robert Dallek
#99. Historians will probably call our era "the age of anxiety." Anxiety is the natural result when our hopes are centered in anything short of God and His will for us.
Billy Graham
#100. 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
