Historian famous quotes

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.
-- Alexander Downer

#Writing #Goodness #Historian

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Past #History #Historian

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
-- Antony Beevor

#Understanding #Duty #Historian

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.
-- Antony Beevor

#Way #Doe #Historian

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Faithful #Historian

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.
-- C. V. Wedgwood

#History #Doe #Historian

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
-- Chinua Achebe

#Hunters #Lions #Historian

That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.
-- D. James Kennedy

#Education #Atheism #Historian

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.
-- David Drake

#Decision #Worthy #Historian

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?
-- Donald Kagan

#Different #Historian #Different Place

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
-- E. L. Doctorow

#Novelists #Historian

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.
-- Edward Gibbon

#Men #History #Historian

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.
-- Edward Hallett Carr

#Facts #Study #Historian

The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.
-- F. F. Bruce

#Unbiased #Christ #Historian

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
-- Ferdinand Marcos

#Writing #Should #Historian

The historian amputates reality.
-- Gaetano Salvemini

#Reality #History #Historian

No historian should be trusted implicitly.
-- George Kitson Clark

#History #Should #Historian

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.
-- Gertrude Atherton

#Fiction #Historian

Study men, not historians.
-- Harry S. Truman

#Men #Study #Historian

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Vices #Hindsight #Historian

I'm a historian, I think history matters, but we don't have to be slavish in following it and restoring it,
-- Jack Granatstein

#Thinking #Matter #Historian

We are all historians in our small way.
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Way #Historian

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
-- Josef Albers

#Art #Tradition #Historian

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.
-- Karl Kraus

#History #Historian #Backwards

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.
-- Karl Kraus

#Journalism #Prophet #Historian

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.
-- Karl Kraus

#Writing #Enough #Historian

The historian is a prophet looking backward.
-- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#Literature #Prophet #Historian

History never repeats itself, historians do.
-- Lee Benson

#Historian

Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.
-- Lee Hazlewood

#Historian

The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.
-- Lucian

#Tasks #Historian

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid
-- Lucian

#Long #Historian #Relate

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
-- Marc Bloch

#Definitions #Facts #Historian

Memory is a poet, not an historian.
-- Marie Howe

#Memories #Poet #Historian

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
-- Max Beerbohm

#History #Doe #Historian

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
-- Niall Ferguson

#Remember #Historian

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.
-- Nikita Khrushchev

#Upside Down #Dangerous #Historian

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.
-- Oliver Cromwell

#God #Historian #Shaking

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
-- Peter Ackroyd

#Ordinary #Historian

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
-- Peter Gay

#Anthropology #Historian

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
-- Philip Guedalla

#Education #History Repeats Itself #Historian

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!
-- Philip Reeve

#Historian

Let's give the historians something to write about
-- Propertius

#Writing #Giving #Historian

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.
-- Reza Aslan

#Jobs #Historian

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.
-- Robert Black

#Artist #Historian #Universe

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.
-- Robert Plant

#Way #Historian #My Way

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.
-- Sophie Swetchine

#Experience #Prophet #Historian

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
-- Stendhal

#Firsts #Ability #Historian

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
-- Thomas B. Macaulay

#Intellectual #Distinction #Historian

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
-- Tony Judt

#Citizens #Historian

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.
-- Robert Darnton

#Want #Historian #Journalist

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.
-- Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

#Facts #Boundaries #Historian

You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.
-- Bill Eppridge

#Historian #Photojournalists

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.
-- Melvin B. Tolson

#Poet #Exceptional #Historian

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
-- Beaumont Newhall

#Photography #Important #Historian

From time to time historians need to be shocked.
-- Peter Burke

#Needs #Historian #Shocked

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?
-- Peter Morgan

#Novelists #Degrees #Historian

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.
-- David Burnett

#Historian #Visuals #Recorders

Truth is with the victors-who, as you know, also controls the historians.
-- Rolf Hochhuth

#Truth #Truth Is #Historian

Women have their uses for historians.
-- Ronald Syme

#Use #Historian

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
-- Ronald Wright

#Inspirational #History Repeats Itself #Historian

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.
-- Geoffrey Elton

#Historian #Skeptical #Ifs

History does not have sides, although historians do.
-- Jay Nordlinger

#Doe #Sides #Historian