Historian Quotes - Page 16

• The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Philosophy, Reality, Views

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• I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

  Robert Darnton

  Want, Journalist, Spells

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

  Jonathan Chait

  Perfect, Choices, Progress

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• Historians of the future will find it incredible that we mutilated babies by cutting off the end of their penises in the name of medicine. There are now serious concerns this routine procedure may actually deprive adult men of a vital part of their sexual sensitivity.

  Dean Edell

  Baby, Cutting, Men

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• Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. Cleopatra is impossible to put down.

  Rick Riordan

  Powerful, Egypt, Color

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• All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

  Carl L. Becker

  Determination, Persistence, History

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• I wanted to work in the arts. My dream come true would be to be an architectural historian and work with the royal palaces and all the fabulous art collections. But I'm not committed enough.

  Jaye Davidson

  Dream, Art, Would Be

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• Historians, only things of weight,
  Results of persons, or affairs of State,
  Briefly, with truth and clearness should relate;
  Laconic shortness memory feeds.

  James R. Heath

  Memories, Weight, Affair

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

  C. V. Wedgwood

  History, Doe, Nations

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• History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  History, Political, Way

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• The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Light, Dust, Sea

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• I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Civilization, Doubt, Moral

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• In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

  John Henrik Clarke

  Views, Years, People

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• Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Self, Effort, Together

  "The Poet and the World". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1996.

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• The Reverend Douglas Wilson may not be a professional historian, as his detractors say, but he has a strong grasp of the essentials of the history of slavery and its relation to Christian doctrine. Indeed, sad to say, his grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms. And the Reverend Mr. Wilson is a fighter, especially effective in defense of Christianity against those who try to turn Jesus' way of salvation into pseudo-moralistic drivel.

  Eugene Genovese

  Christian, Strong, Jesus

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• I retained no records and I am not a good writer anyhow. So the best approach is for historians like you to extract the facts directly from people like me.

  Shunroku Hata

  People, Records, Facts

  "Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939". Book by Alvin D. Coox, p. 1184, 1990.

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• The Tudors was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.

  Annabelle Wallis

  Drama, People, Tudors

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• Somebody said, "Well, you're going to write your definitive book about your life, biography." No, I'm not. I haven't done that. I wrote a book of letters which gives an insight into the real me as opposed to the public perceptions of me. But I'm convinced historians will figure out the things we got wrong and hopefully the things we got right.

  George H. W. Bush

  Real, Book, Writing

  "Transcript: George H.W. Bush on "FOX News Sunday". "FOX News Sunday" with Chris Wallace, www.foxnews.com. November 4, 2007.

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• A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

  Michael Pollan

  Looks, World, Cows

  "Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma". Interview with Anne E. McBride, leitesculinaria.com. March 20, 2007.

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• fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

  Gertrude Atherton

  Fiction

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• The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Order, Giving, Facts

  Edward Hallett Carr (1965). “What is History?”

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• 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 . . .

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Giving, Political, Prejudice

  Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington (1838). “The Confessions of an Elderly Lady”, p.5

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• A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Powerful, Self, Profound

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• To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Intellectual, Distinction

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• Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.

  Odd Nerdrum

  Art, Eye, Emotional

  Source: sturm-lie.be

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