Historian Quotations

The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.

I've said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

One of hardest for any historian or a biographer to do is to capture convincingly on paper something as ethereal as charisma. It's a relative term, and different generations define it differently.

According to tarot historian Gertrude Moakley, the cards' fanciful images - from the Fool to Death - were inspired by the costumed figures who participated in carnival parades.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

I'm not an 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.

I can see that you 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?

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

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

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

I've actually traveled quite a bit with various authors. Judith Miller and I toured the highlands in Scotland with Liz Curtis Higgs, and that was incredible fun. However, I love going with my husband, who - although he is not a writer per se, he is a historian and can give me a lot of insight on various historical locations.

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

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

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

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

Popularizing - much less venturing beyond one's secure turf - was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was - and knew I was - among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don't mean I was the best historian - a quite different measure.

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

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

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

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

Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.

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

My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.

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

Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.

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

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

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

My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections.

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.

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

My - well, I'm very fortunate. I married an art historian who, you know, with whom I travel, and we have a great time.

We stay pretty close to home now. No more shooting acts, or Wild West shows up north like we used to. I'm more of a historian now.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

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.

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.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

Faults ought no more to be concealed than virtues, and that, whatever it may be in a painter, it is no excellence in an historian to throw a veil on deformities.

The most secular, atheist historian on the planet would have to grant that the entire legal system of Western civilization pivots off those tablets.

You've got to understand their reasoning. They think of this historian as one of their pocket-people, whom they feel they can count on.

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.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

I'm very excited, especially traveling with the president, who is a historian on Scotland.

I like to tell people that I discovered (Hansen), ... Alas, he was already discovered when I first met him. He is an excellent historian who has made an enviable reputation for himself.

In the mysteries project we turn students into historian detectives and invite them to do the exciting work of history. Normally, we tell students what happened when we teach history, but in this project we ask them to tell us,

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

We are all historians in our small way.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

Heart and head are contrary historians.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

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

Study men, not historians.

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian . He is also a great historian of Fascism .

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

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

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

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

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

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

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

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.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

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

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

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

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

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

I'm a historian in my own mind.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

History is too important to be left to the historians.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

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

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

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

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.

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 is the invention of historians.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead