Historian Quotes - Page 14

• Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.

  Bart D. Ehrman

  Jesus, Eye, Agendas

  Bart D. Ehrman (2012). “Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth”, p.7, Harper Collins

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• I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.

  Bart D. Ehrman

  Jesus, Silly, Biblical

  "The Gospel According to Bart". Interview with David V. Barrett, "Fortean Times", 2007.

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• I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'

  Terence McKenna

  Mean, Thoughtful, Wings

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• If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries.

  Philippe Falardeau

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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• I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

  David Burnett

  Visuals, Recorders

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• It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Photography, Important, Has Beens

  Beaumont Newhall (1984). “In plain sight: the photographs of Beaumont Newhall”

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• One of the most important factors in life, politics and war, to which historians tend to devote too little attention, is sheer luck, good or ill.

  Robert Rhodes James

  War, Luck, Important

  Robert Rhodes James (1987). “Anthony Eden”

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• You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.

  Bill Eppridge

  Photojournalists

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• 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.

  John Brandon

  College, Doctors, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The historian Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out that people tend to get interested in politics again every 30 years. The universe moves in cycles of three. The number figures in everything from Pythagoras's theory that the universe is based on three to the Father-the-Son-and-the-Holy- Ghost to the three-sided pyramidal shapes that intersect in the Jewish Star of David. The notion of the mystical three, metaphysically, spiritually, and even politically, is quite interesting to me.

  Marianne Williamson

  Stars, Father, Moving

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• John XXI was a very great pope and he's the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don't speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed.

  Elie Wiesel

  Speak, Christ, Killing

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• I think it's important to understand that a cartoonist is not drawing for favourable reviews from politicians. What we're trying to do is capture the popular feeling of the time about a politician or a particular political issue. For that reason I think it sums up public attitudes that is very helpful to historians down the road.

  Terry Mosher

  Attitude, Thinking, Drawing

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.

  Zadie Smith

  Real, Writing, Expression

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If I can educate a little, that's great; if I can cause somebody to go and seek out further information about Lincoln, that's excellent, but, I'm an entertainer, you know? I'm not a historian, I'm a cartoonist.

  Noah Van Sciver

  Littles, Information, Causes

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• Whenever you think of Lincoln as a historian, in his own mind, he becomes the Great Emancipator. This is his role in history henceforth. He was an ambitious man who wanted to make an impact on history, and this is how he did it.

  Eric Foner

  Men, Thinking, Impact

  "Eric Foner on the Perennial Relevance of Abraham Lincoln". Interview with Aaron Leonard, historynewsnetwork.org. October 4, 2010.

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• As Harvard historian of science Peter Galison has demonstrated, the universe of classified knowledge now far exceeds the universe of unclassified knowledge. That's a staggering thought. There is far more classified knowledge in the world than unclassified. And that disparity grows all the time.

  Ryan Shapiro

  World, Disparity, Peter

  Source: news.vice.com

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• The leading, the most respected Vietnam historian, military historian Bernard Fall -he was a hawk incidentally, but he cared for the Vietnamese - he said it wasn't clear to him whether Vietnam could survive as a historical and cultural entity under the most massive attack that any region that size had ever suffered. He was talking about South Vietnam, incidentally.

  Noam Chomsky

  Military, Fall, Talking

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

  Boris Johnson

  Thinking, Men, Differences

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I'm very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn't at all in my early twenties.

  Sylvia Plath

  War, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, People, Way

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

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• In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

  Henry Louis Gates

  African American, Documentaries, Stories

  Source: pittsburghurbanmedia.com

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• Let me name three of the people who influenced me, although it's definitely not a complete list. Ayesha Jalal, the formidable Pakistani-American historian, has rigorously re-evaluated Jinnah's political strategies leading up to Partition. Akbar Ahmed, a former diplomat and now a distinguished scholar, has documented Jinnah's life as a man who welcomed, worked with, and even married people of other faiths. And then there is Ardeshir Cowasjee, the great Parsi newspaper columnist, who in his mid-80s is a kind of living history of all of Pakistan, old enough to have known Jinnah himself.

  Steve Inskeep

  Men, People, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's funny how sometimes historians sneer at journalists, yet they depend on us in the future for the material that they mine. You realize that some of the stories wouldn't have been told if you hadn't gotten to them. There is that sense of capturing a moment that was just about to go over the horizon.

  Lawrence Wright

  Sometimes, Realizing, Moments

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams.

  Oliver Stone

  War, School, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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.

  Oliver Stone

  Children, Important, Trying

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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