Top 100 The Historian Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The historian must have no country. - JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
James W. Loewen
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.
Peter Conrad
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E.L. Doctorow
#13. The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
#21. The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.
Jules Michelet
#22. 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
#23. The historian in me love to uncover things, and the mother in me hates to be lied to...[Why Dotsy investigates murder]
Maria Hudgins
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.
Herbert Butterfield
#31. The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#32. 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
#33. '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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Truth, which is permanent, eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history.
Mahatma Gandhi
#38. Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?
Joshua Foer
#39. The historian's rightful task is to distil experience as a medicinal warning for the future generations, not to distil a drug.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#40. The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.
John Keegan
#41. What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.
Robert M. Price
#42. It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.
C.V. Wedgwood
#43. I've learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love.
Annie Barrows
#44. The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
Marc Bloch
#45. What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.
Paul Johnson
#47. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
Howard Zinn
#49. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
#50. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
Henry James
#51. The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.
Oscar Handlin
#52. Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.
Mason Cooley
#53. Not only is history useless, but the historian should take pride in its uselessness.
James C. Malin
#54. The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.
Goldwin Smith
#55. Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?
Edward Hallett Carr
#56. The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.
Will Durant
#57. Modern life is one sweeping, cradle-to-grave invasion of privacy. An encroachment on our ever-narrowing space. Our footprints in the sand are a billion bytes on a thousand hard drives. Fodder for the snoop and the historian alike.
Paul Levine
#58. What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.
Edward Hallett Carr
#59. The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
Edward Hallett Carr
#60. The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.
Lucian
#61. Want and intelligence,' the historian had written, 'is a dangerous combination.
Becky Chambers
#62. No one should stand for nor chant the Pledge of Allegiance because it was the origin of the Nazi salute and Nazi behavior (see the discoveries by the historian Dr. Rex Curry in the many books that cite his academic work)
Lin Xun
#63. Respect for the faith of sincere believers cannot be allowed either to block or deflect the investigation of the historian.
Maxime Rodinson
#64. With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.
Kenneth M. Stampp
#65. It is the historian's function, not to make us clever for the next time, but to make us wise forever.
Jacob Burckhardt
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Beaumont Newhall
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. (The historian) was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.
Sam Wineburg
#96. The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Peter Ackroyd
#97. History is not the pure past; history is a past interpreted from the present of the historian.
Justo L. Gonzalez
#98. it is not surprising that some, such as the historian John R. Vile, suggest we consider the concession as a form of military surrender or even a funeral oration. Just as after a war, the public wants peace after a presidential campaign. They hope that politicians will emulate that most
Scott Farris
#99. The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
Paul De Man
#100. The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity (and the humility) of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.
Gertrude Himmelfarb
