Historian Quotes

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.

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

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.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

I didn't realize the president was such an historian.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.