Historian Quotes
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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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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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The darkness, of which the historians complain, is essentially the darkness of their own ignorance.
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Fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.
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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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No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for 'Before Coffee'.
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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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I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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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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I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.
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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.
