For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.
It's interesting - an actor's research is different to just historian's research. I'm looking for things that I can actually physically use in the movie.
But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.
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?
It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.
I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?
I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things.
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
I'm not an aviation historian, I'm not an Air Force aficionado, and I'm definitely not a ufologist. I'm not someone who studies UFOs.
Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems.
John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
As to the ancient historians, from to , we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further: for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man, and a blin...
For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.
The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them
