Historian Quotes

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?

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.

You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.

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.

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.

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.

If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

The ego is a self-justifying historian which seeks only that information that agrees with it, rewrites history when it needs to, and does not even see the evidence that threatens it.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

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.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

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.

To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

The long historian of my country's woes.

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?

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.

No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.

Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.

The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.

The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past