Our task as historians is to make past conflicts live again; not to lament the verdict or to wish for a different one. It bewildered me when my old master A. F. Pribram, a very great historian, said in the nineteen-thirties: 'It is still not decided ...
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the...
I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in som...
George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent t...
Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who "built a world around Europe", as historians "know", according to Braudel. That is indeed the "knowledge" of the European historians who themselves "invented" history and then put it to ...
The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.
A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.
Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.
Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.
I didn't realize the president was such an historian.
I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.
Historians predict the past for a living.
The historian records, but the novelist creates.
A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that...
Every historian discloses a new horizon.
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
