Historian Quotes - Page 23

• All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Numbers, Example, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

  Michel de Montaigne

  History, Meat, Middle

  Michel de Montaigne (1850). “Works, Comprising His Essays, Letters, and Journey Through Germany and Italy: With Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices &c., &c”, p.217

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.

  Thomas Frank

  War, President, May

  "George W. Is No Martyr" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 21, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

  G. M. Trevelyan

  People, History, Priests

  G.M. Trevelyan (1949). “CLIO A MUSE AND OTHER ESSAYS”

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Mistake, Past, Men

  8 Copy quote

• The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

  Louis Moreau Gottschalk

  History, Historical, Variables

  7 Copy quote

• [T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

  Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

  History, Humanity, Couches

  6 Copy quote

• A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life.

  Allen Johnson

  Thinking, History, Ignorant

  4 Copy quote

• The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

  E. M. Forster

  Moving, Men, Gains

  4 Copy quote

• Let's put it this way. I question whether 6 million Jews actually died in Nazi death camps. There are two major sources for Holocaust stories. One is the Nuremburg war-crimes trial, which has been shown by all honest historians to be a farce of justice. Another source is the great body of literature and media work, and at least 90% of that material is from biased Jewish sources.

  David Duke

  War, Media, Two

  75 Copy quote

• Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Memorable, Men, World

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.43, Courier Corporation

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The student of biology is often struck with the feeling that historians, when dealing with the rise and fall of nations, do not generally view the phenomena from a sufficiently high biological standpoint. To me, at least, they seem to attach too much importance to individual rulers and soldiers, and to particular wars, policies, religions, and customs; while at the same time they make little attempt to extract the fundamental causes of national success or failure.

  Ronald Ross

  War, Fall, Science

  22 Copy quote

• A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

  Samuel Eliot Morison

  Writing, Hints, May

  12 Copy quote

• The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.

  Buffalo Bill

  Fighting, Men, Giving

  Buffalo Bill, W. F. Cody (2012). “Buffalo Bill's Life Story: An Autobiography”, p.172, Courier Corporation

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Greatness, Men, Spirit

  4 Copy quote

• The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, World, May

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.111, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

  Alexander Downer

  Writing, Goodness, Wells

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Humanity, Use, Records

  7 Copy quote

• It's interesting - an actor's research is different to just historian's research. I'm looking for things that I can actually physically use in the movie.

  Ioan Gruffudd

  Interesting, Different, Use

  "Ioan Gruffudd - Exclusive Collider Interview". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. November 13, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly bestial centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say 'Auschwitz' and 'Dresden' and 'Hiroshima' and 'Vietnam' and 'Napalm.' For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio. And if there were a way to kill people with the B Minor Mass, the Pentagon-Madison Avenue axis would have found it.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Death, Science, Axes

  Erwin Chargaff (1977). “Voices in the labyrinth: nature, man, and science”, Harper San Francisco

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Social historians of the future no doubt will be amused by the fact that we late-twentieth-century Americans found it acceptable to discuss publicly in detail the most intimate aspects of personal life, while maintaining an almost prudish reserve concerning the political significance of family life.

  Mary Ann Glendon

  Political, Doubt, Details

  9 Copy quote

• History is the invention of historians.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  History, Invention

  7 Copy quote

• Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret... a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.

  Dan Brown

  Art, Powerful, Believe

  7 Copy quote

• The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men.

  John Aubrey

  Religious, Writing, Men

  "John Aubrey and the realm of learning". Book by Michael Cyril William Hunter, Science History Publications, p. 122, 1975.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.

  David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech

  May, Empires, Way

  9 Copy quote