Historian Quotes - Page 20

• This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.

  Orson Scott Card

  Moving, Voice, World

  Orson Scott Card (2010). “Ender's Game”, p.90, Macmillan

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• Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

  Terry Pratchett

  Hands, People, Mind

  Terry Pratchett (2009). “Jingo: (Discworld Novel 21)”, p.247, Random House

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• History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

  Julian Barnes

  Happened

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• When critics or art historians or curators ask me why I still paint, the answer is that I am not naive.

  Luc Tuymans

  Art, Answers, Paint

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• The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hurt, Men, People

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• The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Writing, Successful, Science

  Herbert Butterfield (1931). “The Whig interpretation of history”

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• Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

  Simon Schama

  Forever, Shadow, Inability

  "Dead Certainties". Book by Simon Schama, p. 320, 1991.

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• To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

  Robin G. Collingwood

  Nature, Science, Intelligent

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• It seems to me that every phenomenon, every fact, itself is the really interesting object. Whoever explains it, or connects it with other events, usually only amuses himself or makes sport of us, as, for instance, the naturalist or historian. But a single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Sports, Science, Interesting

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• In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

  Peter Drucker

  Technology, Important Events, Numbers

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• In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Atheist, Book, Devil

  Ravi Zacharias (2004). “The Real Face of Atheism”, p.25, Baker Books

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• Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Home, Science, Past

  Thomas S. Kuhn (1987). “Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912”, p.364, University of Chicago Press

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• Placed as the fossils are in their several tiers of burial-places the one over the other; we have in them true witnesses of successive existences, whilst the historian of man is constantly at fault as to dates and even the sequence of events, to say nothing of the contradicting statements which he is forced to reconcile.

  Roderick Murchison

  Science, Men, Events

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• Historians will come to their own judgments about President Kennedy. Here is how I choose to remember him. He was an heir to wealth who felt the anguish of the poor. He was an orator of excellence who spoke for the voiceless. He was a son of Harvard who reached out to the sons and daughters of Appalachia. He was a man of special grace who had a special care for the retarded and handicapped. He was a hero of war who fought hardest for peace. He said and proved in word and deed that one man can make a difference.

  Edward Kennedy

  Daughter, War, Hero

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• Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

  Benjamin Franklin

  History, Done, Relate

  Benjamin Franklin, Ormond Seavey (1998). “Autobiography and Other Writings”, p.278, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Art shouldn't be locked away in galleries and libraries and books. Art should be for everybody and not just art buffs, historians and so-called experts.

  Julian Beever

  Art, Book, Library

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• No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.

  Alice Corbin Henderson

  War, Support, United States

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• Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonightto you, the great silent majority of my fellow AmericansI ask for your support.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Peace, Powerful, America

  Address to the Nation on VietnamWar, 3 Nov. 1969. The term silent majority is found as early as 1870, when the Economist (19 Nov.) referred to "the silent majority which so seldom appears at the polls." See Petronius 2; Edward Young 1

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• We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Peace, America, Liberty

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.4089, Delphi Classics

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• The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Novelists, Fiction

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.838, GENERAL PRESS

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• If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Photography, Faithful, Ifs

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• Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Writing, Piano, Novelists

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• Probably the only people left who think that economics deserves a Nobel Prize are economists. It confirms their conceit that they're doing 'science' rather than the less tidy task of observing the world and trying to make sense of it. This, after all, is done by mere historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and (heaven forbid) even journalists. Economists are loath to admit that they belong in such raffish company.

  Robert J. Samuelson

  Thinking, People, Heaven

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• The choice is ours-yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over a global bubble economy that keeps expanding until it bursts, leading to economic decline. Or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that stabilizes population, eradicates poverty, and stabilizes climate. Historians will record the choice, but it is ours to make.

  Lester R. Brown

  Choices, Generations, Records

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• Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

  Lee Simonson

  Education, Events, Favourite

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