Historian Quotes

Historian Quote of the day

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

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.

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

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

The historian amputates reality.

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.

The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source among the stars.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

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?

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.

The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.

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.

I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.

I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

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.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.

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.