Historian Quotes
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Let's put it this way. I question whether 6 million Jews actually died in Nazi death camps. There are two major sources for Holocaust stories. One is the Nuremburg war-crimes trial, which has been shown by all honest historians to be a farce of justice. Another source is the great body of literature and media work, and at least 90% of that material is from biased Jewish sources.
David Duke
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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.
Norman Davies
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For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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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.
Bart Ehrman
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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
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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
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The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.
Erwin Panofsky
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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech
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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.
Debby Applegate
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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.
Gail Fine
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A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
Norman Davies
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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
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It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
Beaumont Newhall
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For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.
Hilary Mantel
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Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.
Ernst Junger
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I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
Sherman Alexie
