Historian Quotes
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I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.
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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.
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The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.
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The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.
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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.
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Whenever you think of Lincoln as a historian, in his own mind, he becomes the Great Emancipator. This is his role in history henceforth. He was an ambitious man who wanted to make an impact on history, and this is how he did it.
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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.
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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.
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Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.
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A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
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It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
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It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
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The historian amputates reality.
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Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.
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Ultimately a historian has to put together a cohesive work. That doesn't mean that your curiosity is ever totally satisfied.
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I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.
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Tides of History provides a splendid prism through which we may view the wider world of Victorian science. . . . Historians of science will have cause to heap praise on this book, but so too will the non-specialists. The author's splendid writing style, at times appropriately Puckish, makes this work an accessible and enjoyable read.
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Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.
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I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field.
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The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.
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In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.
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The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
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If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
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If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong in the latter camp.
