A Quote by Napoleon Bonaparte

History is the invention of historians.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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Historians History Invention

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Napoleon Bonaparte
French - Statesman
August 15, 1769 - May 5, 1821

The lives of heroes have enriched history, and history has adorned the actions of heroes ; and thus I cannot say whether the historians are more indebted to those who provided them with such noble materials, or those great men to their historians.

Jean de la Bruyere

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

John Cusack

The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

Oliver Stone

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

C. S. Lewis

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

Ferdinand Marcos

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

Julian Barnes

I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.

Peter Greenaway

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

Edmund Morgan

My favorite thing is talking to people about history - that's what I like doing. The sort of history I do isn't just for professional historians.

Lucy Worsley

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

Dave Barry

Historians of a generation ago were often shocked by the violence with which scientists rejected the history of their own subject as irrelevant; they could not understand how the members of any academic profession could fail to be intrigued by the study of their own cultural heritage. What these historians did not grasp was that scientists will welcome the history of science only when it has been demonstrated that this discipline can add to our understanding of science itself and thus help to produce, in some sense, better scientists.

I. Bernard Cohen

Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.

Peter Earle

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

David Grann

There are many points in the history of an invention which the inventor himself is apt to overlook as trifling, but in which posterity never fail to take a deep interest. The progress of the human mind is never traced with such a lively interest as through the steps by which it perfects a great invention; and there is certainly no invention respecting which this minute information will be more eagerly sought after, than in the case of the steam-engine.

David Brewster

My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.

Shinzo Abe

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Claire Tomalin

A Quote by Napoleon Bonaparte

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