Historian Quotes

• 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.

  G. M. Trevelyan

  Past, History, Historical

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• The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Past, Keys, History

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• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

  H. L. Mencken

  History, Historical, Novelists

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

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• Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

  Ambrose Bierce

  History, Gossip, Gauges

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• The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

  Marc Bloch

  Lying, History, Giants

  Marc Bloch (1992). “The Historian's Craft”, p.22, Manchester University Press

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• The historian amputates reality.

  Gaetano Salvemini

  Reality, History

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

  Shailer Mathews

  Country, History, Gone

  Shailer Mathews (2006). “The Spiritual Interpretation of History”, p.31, Cosimo, Inc.

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

  George Santayana

  Writing History, Needs, Written

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.378, 谷月社

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• Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

  Frank Herbert

  Exercise, Past, Fit

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• As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Stories, Information, Mass

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• The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred.

  Lucian

  Country, Kings, Integrity

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• If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.

  David Herbert Donald

  Thinking, Detectives, Tasks

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• "Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background - the controlling background - of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible."

  Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper

  Believe, Philosophical, History

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• God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

  Samuel Butler

  Education, Past, History

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• An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

  Agnes Repplier

  Passion, Political, Wasps

  Agnes Repplier (2009). “American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier”, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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

  Chinua Achebe

  Lions, Hunters, Hunts

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Dec 29, 2013

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• Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Greatness, Men

  Intentions "The Critic as Artist" pt. 1 (1891)

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• Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

  H. G. Wells

  Education, Appreciation, Witty

  Outline of History (1920) vol. 2, ch. 41, pt. 4

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• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

  Errol Morris

  Past, Infancy Is, History

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• 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.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Poetry, May, Ought

  Miguel de CERVANTES SAAVEDRA (1819). “Don Quixote de la Mancha”, p.30

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• Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

  Paul Johnson

  Eye, Views, History

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• 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.

  David Drake

  Decision, Worthy, Humans

  David Drake (2009). “Patriots”, p.39, Baen Publishing Enterprises

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• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

  Winston Churchill

  Inspirational, Positive, Badass

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  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  "The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress", Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana, 1905-1906.

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• Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

  Ronald Wright

  Inspirational, History Repeats Itself, Repeating History

  Ronald Wright (2010). “A Short History Of Progress”, p.107, Canongate Books

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