Historian Quotes - Page 17

• I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me.

  Holt McCallany

  Sports, Tape, Elements

  Source: collider.com

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• I wrote about World War II because I didn't understand it. I think that's the reason that historians are drawn to any subject - there's something about it that doesn't make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.

  Nicholson Baker

  War, Thinking, Order

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Doe, Campaigns

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

  Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

  Writing, Imagination, Quality

  Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1954). “Collected Poems”

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• As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers.

  James McBride

  New York, Book, Artist

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It has been said by church historians that in those periods of Christian history where renewal, revival, and awakening took place and the church was at its strongest, that coincidental with those periods in church history, there was a strong focus on the psalms in the life of God's people-particularly in the worship of God's people.

  R. C. Sproul

  Christian, Strong, People

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• When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation...they'll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages.

  Lee Iacocca

  Age, Looks, Way

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• You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".

  John Hodgman

  Team, Hands, Winner

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• During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen.

  George Orwell

  Fall, Home, Russia

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945”

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• Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

  Jonathan Swift

  Taken, Aeneas, Giving

  Jonathan Swift (2010). “The Battle of the Books: And Other Works, Including 'A Modest Proposal'”, p.187, The Floating Press

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• I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition!

  Galileo Galilei

  Men, Littles, Philosopher

  Letter to Fr. Vincenzo Renieri, 1633.

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• Spare me therefore, your good intentions, your inner sensitivities, your unarticulated and unexpressed love. And spare me also these tedious psycho-historians which, by exposing the goodness inside the bad man, and the evil in the good-invariably establish a vulgar and perverse egalitarianism, as if the arrangement of what is outside and what inside makes no moral difference.

  Willard Gaylin

  Men, Egalitarianism, Differences

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• Truth, which is permanent, eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Truth, Events, Elude

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• It's an academic book, and it's discussed under academic criteria. German historians cultivate so-called objectivity. They persuade themselves that they can switch off the subjective and therefore the unsettling.

  Gotz Aly

  Book, Objectivity, Academic

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I am provoked at the contempt which most historians show for humanity in general; one would think by them, that the whole human species consisted but of about a hundred and fifty people, called and dignified (commonly very undeservedly too) by the titles of Emperors, Kings, Popes, Generals, and Ministers.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Kings, Thinking, People

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• 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.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Men, Delight, World

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1867). “Don Quixote”, p.317

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• Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.

  Richard Whately

  Country, Rocks, History

  Richard Whately (1856). “Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley”, p.194

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• All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Texas, Iowa, People

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• Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals.

  James A. Haught

  Book, Men, Animal

  James A. Haught (1990). “Holy horrors: an illustrated history of religious murder and madness”

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• We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water.

  Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

  Light, Soul And Body, Blood

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• When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

  Melvin B. Tolson

  Poet, Exceptional

  Melvin B. Tolson (1982). “Caviar and Cabbage”

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• David Shi (historian of the simple life) describes the common denominator among the various approaches to simpler living as the understanding that the making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother the purity of the soul, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society.

  Duane Elgin

  Simple, Understanding, Soul

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• I really love acting, but I also really want to be a historian, so its really confusing.

  Yara

  Confusing, Acting, Want

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• While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

  Reading, Science, Past

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey (1954). “The judgment of history”

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• The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Good Luck, Men, Fishing

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.459, Simon and Schuster

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