Top 531 Historians Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

Look, I do not control alpinism. But maybe I was too successful. Many in the mountaineering scene - journalists, second-rate climbers, lecturers, so-called historians - had a problem with me for many years.

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

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

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

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.

Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.

Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.

The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

Even well-known historians like Edward Gibbon are talking about how the soldiers of the 18th century were not able to do the same type of exercise [like Romans].

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.

It may be said of many palaeontologists, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper said recently of 18th century historians: "Their most serious error was to measure the past by the present".

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory . . .

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.

When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena "signs," the sceptics "coincidence," and psychologists "concentrated focus," although I've yet to find out what term historians should use).

Science will...produce the data..., but never the full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we shall need...most of all the brains of poets, [and] also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.

I think a Person who is thus terrified with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.

Events are moving so fast and what in one moment seems impossible, the next is happening. I'm sure historians will, in time, provide theories and analysis, but for now I think most of us simply want the tide stemmed.

Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong in the latter camp.

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But - very rarely - I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

It didn't occur to me that I could be a writer until college. I saw all these people around me training to be doctors, or historians, or C.E.O.'s or whatnot, and I thought, Maybe I want to be a writer.

We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see decline of empire.

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.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things.

Historians evaluating George W. Bush's first term will focus on foreign policy and, most of all, 9/11. I think they will criticize him for his early reaction, for not returning at once to Washington, D.C.

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

... we will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.

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.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.

Future historians will be able to study at the Jimmy Carter Library, the Gerald Ford Library, the Ronald Reagan Library, and the Bill Clinton Adult Bookstore.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.