Quotes and Sayings about Historians
"Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward."
- Josef Albers
(Related: Art, Historians)
"Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low."
- Aldrich Ames
(Related: Europe, Historians)
"Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution."
- Barbara Amiel
(Related: People, Revolution, Historians, Will)
"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
(Related: Men, Historians, Religious)
"To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende."
- Erich Auerbach
(Related: History, Historians)
"I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject."
- Ibrahim Babangida
(Related: Authority, Events, Facts, Historians, Living)
"Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened."
- Kenneth Baker
(Related: Causes, Historians)
"In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: History, America, Europe, Historians, Responsibility, Sense)
"Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them."
- George W. Bush
(Related: History, Historians, Now)
"God cannot alter the past, though historians can."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: God, Historians, Past)
"I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past."
- Ron Chernow
(Related: Historians, Past)
"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
(Related: Art, Artists, Historians)
"Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: People, Historians, Poets)
"In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century."
- Louis Finkelstein
(Related: Action, Historians, Schools, Today)
"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
(Related: Men, Experience, Genius, Gain, Historians, Will, World)
"There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Future, Historians, Writing)
"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
(Related: Beauty, Elegance, Historians, Intuition, Mathematicians, Talk, Thinking, Worth)
"Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Historians, Past, Present)
"History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other."
- Philip Guedalla
(Related: History, Historians)
"Britain will be honoured by historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it."
- Lord Harlech
(Related: Historians, Will)
"The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970."
- Tom Hayden
(Related: History, Civil rights, Historians)
"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
(Related: People, Historians, Nation, Nations, Past)
"Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive."
- Bruce Jackson
(Related: History, Historians)
"History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story."
- Donald Kagan
(Related: History, Historians)
"People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line."
- Dean Kamen
(Related: People, Historians, Mistakes)
"Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems."
- Aly Khan
(Related: Islam, Beginning, Force, Historians, Now)
"Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species."
- Konrad Lorenz
(Related: Evolution, Fact, Historians, Will)
"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
(Related: Society, Time, Day, Historians, Will)
"Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get."
- Samuel E. Morison
(Related: Quality, Honesty, Countries, Historians, Public)
"I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years."
- David Rockefeller
(Related: Art, History, Mother, Appreciation, Historians, Years)
"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
(Related: Work, Fact, Historians, Research)
"You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry."
- Dougray Scott
(Related: Film, Historians)
"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
(Related: Imagination, Movies, Hell, Historians)
"The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding."
- Albion W. Small
(Related: Facts, Historians, Quarrel, Worth)
"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."
- Oliver Stone
(Related: Facts, Historians, Judgment, Order, Will)
"Historians still often see the end of the war as meaning nothing more for Germany than lost territories, lost participation in colonization, and lost assets for the state and individuals. They frequently overlook the most serious loss that Germany suffered."
- Gustav Stresemann
(Related: War, End, Germany, Historians, Loss, Meaning, Nothing, Participation, State)
"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
- Leo Tolstoy
(Related: People, Historians, Questions)
"Study men, not historians."
- Harry S. Truman
(Related: Men, Historians, Study)
"How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians."
- Horace Walpole
(Related: Circumstances, Historians, Shakespeare)
"If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Europe, Future, Germany, Historians, Nations, Past)
"I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at."
- Frederick Wiseman
(Related: Hope, Historians, Will)