Historian Quotes

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.

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.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

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.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

I tried, after I wrote 'Twilight,' to read 'The Historian,' because it was the big thing that summer. But I can't read other people's vampires. If it's too close, I get upset; if it's too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.

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.

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.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

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.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.

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 think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.