1.
There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Chinua Achebe
It is often said that until those who are oppressed are able to tell their own stories, the narrative of the oppressor will remain triumphant.
2.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
Ferdinand Marcos
3.
Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.
Nikita Khrushchev
6.
Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?
Edward Hallett Carr
7.
What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.
Oliver Cromwell
8.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E. L. Doctorow
10.
When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.
Melvin B. Tolson
11.
Memory is a poet, not an historian.
Marie Howe
12.
Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
Ronald Wright
13.
I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.
Robert Plant
14.
The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.
G. M. Trevelyan
15.
I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.
David Burnett
16.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Stendhal
17.
The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.
F. F. Bruce
18.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
Marc Bloch
19.
History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
Max Beerbohm
20.
Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.
George W. Bush
21.
The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.
Miguel de Cervantes
22.
That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.
D. James Kennedy
23.
You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.
Bill Eppridge
24.
Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
Peter Gay
25.
A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.
C. V. Wedgwood
26.
I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.
Mike Tyson
27.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
28.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
Josef Albers
29.
Every historian discloses a new horizon.
George Sand
30.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.
Edward Gibbon
31.
There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.
Peter Greenaway
34.
The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.
B. H. Liddell Hart
36.
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
Ambrose Bierce
37.
From time to time historians need to be shocked.
Peter Burke
38.
A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.
Karl Kraus
41.
History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.
David Drake
42.
Computer scientists are the historians of computing.
Gordon Bell
43.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
44.
To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?
Peter Morgan
45.
If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Beaumont Newhall
46.
History does not have sides, although historians do.
Jay Nordlinger
47.
Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.
Benjamin Franklin
48.
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
Hilary Mantel