Historian Quotes
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The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history thats least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
Tom Hayden
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
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Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.
George Bernard Shaw
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One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant.
Victor Hugo
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The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.
Edward Hallett Carr
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Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Herodotus
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A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
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What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
Will Self
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The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
Susanne Langer
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It seems to me that every phenomenon, every fact, itself is the really interesting object. Whoever explains it, or connects it with other events, usually only amuses himself or makes sport of us, as, for instance, the naturalist or historian. But a single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.
Edward Hallett Carr
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In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!
Bart Ehrman
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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.
Edward Hallett Carr
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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.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
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The historian amputates reality.
Gaetano Salvemini
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The Reverend Douglas Wilson may not be a professional historian, as his detractors say, but he has a strong grasp of the essentials of the history of slavery and its relation to Christian doctrine. Indeed, sad to say, his grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms. And the Reverend Mr. Wilson is a fighter, especially effective in defense of Christianity against those who try to turn Jesus' way of salvation into pseudo-moralistic drivel.
Eugene Genovese
