Historian Quotes - Page 19

• An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

  Philip Reeve

  Engineers

  Philip Reeve (2012). “Predator Cities #1: Mortal Engines”, p.217, Scholastic Inc.

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• Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Facts, Study

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

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• History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Home, Style, Facts

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

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• But, historians, and even common sense, may inform us, that, however specious these ideas of perfect equality may seem, they are really, at bottom, impracticable; and were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community.

  David Hume

  Art, Men, Ideas

  David Hume (2013). “Essays and Treatises on Philosophical Subjects”, p.290, Broadview Press

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• I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

  Ibrahim Babangida

  Believe, Historical, Events

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• After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.

  Ysabeau S. Wilce

  Past, Research, World

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• Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

  Samuel Eliot Morison

  Country, Honesty, Intellectual

  Samuel Eliot Morison (1953). “By Land and by Sea: Essays and Addresses”, New York : Knopf

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• I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

  Ron Chernow

  Past, Thinking, Tides

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• emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectations. It is, most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility.

  R. A. Salvatore

  Hate, Past, Reality

  R.A. Salvatore (2008). “The Orc King: Transitions”, p.16, Wizards of the Coast

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• I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

  Eduardo Galeano

  Past, Scrapbooking, Remember

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• The ego is a self-justifying historian which seeks only that information that agrees with it, rewrites history when it needs to, and does not even see the evidence that threatens it.

  Anthony Greenwald

  Self, Ego, Needs

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• The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

  Jules Michelet

  Firsts, Instruments, Duty

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• There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.

  Glenn T. Seaborg

  Men, Discovery, Discipline

  "Biographical Memoirs" edited by Darleane C. Hoffman, (p. 252), 2000.

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• I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Song, Believe, Character

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.102, Ultramarine Publishing

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• We are not philosophers, we are sovereigns. The rules that govern our behavior are not the rules for other men, and our honor, I think, is a different thing entirely, difficult for anyone but the historians and the gods to judge.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Men, Thinking, Judging

  Megan Whalen Turner (2010). “A Conspiracy of Kings”, Greenwillow

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• Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, shes probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we dont see her much on the political landscape in this country, shes kind of disappeared and she doesnt speak out much anymore.

  Jonathan Coe

  Country, Hands, Speaks Out

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• I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

  Penelope Lively

  Writing, Social, Century

  "'I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2001.

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• As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

  Margaret Atwood

  Past, Echoes, Darkness

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.311, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I'm a historian, I think history matters, but we don't have to be slavish in following it and restoring it.

  Jack Granatstein

  Thinking, Matter, Following

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• It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.

  Isaac Marion

  Song, Kissing, Best Effort

  Isaac Marion (2012). “Warm Bodies: A Novel”, p.109, Simon and Schuster

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• Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete.

  Eric Schlosser

  Attitude, Technology, Thinking

  Eric Schlosser (2002). “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”, Harper Perennial

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• The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Morning, New York

  "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen". Book by Christopher McDougall, March 29, 2011.

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• That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

  Julian Barnes

  Order, Needs, Facts

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• Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

  C. S. Lewis

  Poet, Invention, Conscious

  C. S. Lewis (1990). “Poetry and prose in the sixteenth century”, Oxford Univ Pr on Demand

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• But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public

  Bernice Johnson Reagon

  Research, Just Being, Producers

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