Quotes of: Historians Keyword

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he under...

Victor Hugo

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Claire Tomalin

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Oliver Stone

I've said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it.

Hassan Rouhani

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

Henry Louis Gates

Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

African

Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

Ibo

As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price.

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Hilary Mantel

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

Oliver Stone

As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.

Niall Ferguson

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Penelope Lively

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing t...

Colm Toibin

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.

The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a g...

E. M. Forster

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever sty...

What Is History?

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable." -Professor Charles Homer Haskins

Jill Lepore

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

The Historian

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the...

A People's History of the United States

The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

What was, was. The past defines itself. Historians refuse to accept that definition & instead superimpose their analysis of the past through the eyes of the present. Thus, history becomes a pale reflection of the present, while the true past is lost ...

Dawn for a Distant Earth