A Quote by Howard Zinn

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

Howard Zinn

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Quote Author

Howard Zinn
American - Historian
August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010

I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.

J. B. Bury

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

Edward Hallett Carr

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

Oliver Stone

The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.

Augustine Birrell

The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard--and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.

Timothy Garton Ash

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

Robert Darnton

I'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.

Jonathon Keats

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

Karl Kraus

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

Alexis Ohanian

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

Christopher Hitchens

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Agatha Christie

Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.

Debby Applegate

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Joseph Conrad

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.

Shailer Mathews

Politics is my second passion, but as a historian, you have to be genuinely neutral. You have failed in your primary duty as a historian if you are one side or the other.