The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
Historians conquer the past, not the future. (Les historiens conquièrent - Le passé, non l'avenir)
It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.
'The Tudors' was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.
Some historians trace the start of the War on Terror to November 4, 1979, the day the hostages were taken in Tehran.
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation ...
The line between patriot and terrorist is drawn by the historian.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.
You know historians - can't leave a puzzle alone
Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.
I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.
History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
