I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.
As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
Not only is history useless, but the historian should take pride in its uselessness.
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
Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.
History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other." [ ]
'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.
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.
Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.
Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong.
Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focu...
The reason I put so much energy into it at the beginning was that while there were plenty of people looking after the talkies, almost nobody was doing the same for the silents. Now there are plenty of very good historians and restorers.
At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.
The future historian will rank as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century. {Stanton's opinion of the great }
