Top 531 Historians Quotes & Sayings

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Women have their uses for historians.

I want my children to have access to something that looks beyond what I call the tyranny of now. You read the paper, everyone talks about that thing [in the news] that day, and all the subconscious really important stuff that's going on is being neglected. 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.

Artists are the emotional historians of the world.

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

If physicists could not quote in the text, they would not feel that much was lost with respect to advancement of knowledge of the natural world. If historians could not quote, they would deem it a disastrous impediment to the communication of knowledge about the past. A luxury for physicists, quotation is a necessity for historians, indispensable to historiography.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.

Let's give the historians something to write about

We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

History is the invention of historians.

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

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed.

That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for 'Before Coffee'.

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.

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.

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

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

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.

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

Leave history to historians.

Study men, not historians.

Truth is with the victors-who, as you know, also controls the historians.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

The librarians know the secrets, not the historians

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

History is too important to be left to the historians.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

History does not have sides, although historians do.

It has always been difficult for historians to fully grasp the intelligence of painters.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

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

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.

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

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

Heart and head are contrary historians.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

We are all historians in our small way.

As historians, our training and discipline is based on documentary evidence,.

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.

Two main groups like to drop the readymade bomb—galleries and art historians. Galleries love to drop the Duchamp brand because dealers can try to convince clients of an artist’s worth just by mentioning the mouthwatering response readymade. Most Art Historians aren’t interested in what artists are making in Bushwick studios, most of whom rarely wake up with Duchamp on the brain.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.