Historian Quotes

I can see that you [Bruce Cole] are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

A historian should not be didactic-that is a word that makes my blood run cold.

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.

A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Despite the documented evidence by chess historian HJR Murray, I've always thought that chess was invented by a goddess

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

I can see only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

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.

As the primary end of History is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an Historian.

It's interesting - an actor's research is different to just historian's research. I'm looking for things that I can actually physically use in the movie.

I'm a historian, I think history matters, but we don't have to be slavish in following it and restoring it.

The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies...

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

Heart and head are contrary historians.

I'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.

A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate, and impress the mind.

I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.

Any political historian can give innumerable examples of one percenters who have gone on to success, maybe even Bill Clinton himself?

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid

The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.

Truth, which is permanent, eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history.

Anne Romaine [ is ]folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field [of Malcolm X].

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

I'm old enough, I remember when Richard Nixon had the election stolen in 1960. And no serious historian doubts that Illinois and Texas were stolen.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

I'm a historian in my own mind.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy

[T]he historian and the detective have much in common.

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

History is too important to be left to the historians.