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.
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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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Military historian Richard Holmes.
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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.
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I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'
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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.
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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.
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A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.
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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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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.
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
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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 see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.
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The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
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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.
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No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for 'Before Coffee'.
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The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.
