Historian Quotes

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

The historian amputates reality.

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.

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?

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

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

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

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

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

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

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.

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.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

History is the invention of historians.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Study men, not historians.

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

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

History does not have sides, although historians do.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

Women have their uses for historians.

We are all historians in our small way.

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

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.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.