Historian Quotes
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I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.
Tom Hanks -
No historian should be trusted implicitly.
George Kitson Clark
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As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski -
It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.
Mircea Eliade -
The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.
Michel Foucault -
Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.
Amanda Foreman -
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
Norman Davies -
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.
Miguel de Cervantes
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A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
Norman Davies -
Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.
Edward Hallett Carr -
No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.
Alice Corbin Henderson -
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel -
I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.
Rick Atkinson -
I'm a professional historian. I do my research. I have a PhD. What does my race have to do with it?
Nell Irvin Painter
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It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
Norman Davies -
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
George Eliot -
Those who read the fiction assume that, because I'm also a historian, I know what I'm talking about.
Saul David -
No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for 'Before Coffee'.
Cherise Sinclair -
I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
Michael Ondaatje -
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
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Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.
Adrian Anthony Gill -
I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
Sherman Alexie -
My basic notion regarding the matter of historical recognition is basically, it's a matter that should be left to the good hands of historians and experts.
Shinzo Abe -
Though tax records are generally looked upon as a nuisance, the day may come when historians will realize that tax records tell the real story behind civilized life. How people were taxed, who was taxed, and what was taxed tell more about a society than anything else. Tax habits could be to civilization what sex habits are to personality. They are basic clues to the way a society behaves.
Charles Adams