Historian Quotes - Page 24

• If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

  E. M. Forster

  Passion, Sleep, Past

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• A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Gratitude, Research, Might

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• Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.

  Victor Hugo

  Writing, Play, Tyrants

  "Les misérables".

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• Artists are the emotional historians of the world.

  Richard Blanco

  Artist, Emotional, World

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• He is likely to remain the one historian of the Sierra; he imported into his view the imagination of the poet and the reverence of the worshipper.... William Kent, during Muir’s life, paid him a rare tribute in giving to the nation a park of redwoods with the understanding that it should be named Muir Woods. But the nation owes him more. His work was not sectional but for the whole people, for he was the real father of the forest reservations of America.

  Robert Underwood Johnson

  Father, Real, America

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• I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record 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

  Christian, Believe, Civilization

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• Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

  Kitty Kelley

  War, Men, White

  "Capturing Camelot" by Kitty Kelley, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 27, 2012.

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• The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

  John Henrik Clarke

  Acceptance, People, Community

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• Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

  Michael N. Castle

  Believe, Struggle, Rights

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• The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Writing, Technology, Errors

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• Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

  Peter Gay

  Anthropology

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• It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Fiction, World

  Sir Winston Churchill (1954). “Sir Winston Churchill: a self-portrait”

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• Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.

  Gilbert Gottfried

  Character, Eye, Details

  Gilbert Gottfried (2011). “Rubber Balls and Liquor”, p.23, Macmillan

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• History never repeats itself, historians do.

  Lee Benson

  Repeats

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• For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

  Eric Foner

  Past, Allies, Events

  Eric Foner (1988). “Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877”, Harpercollins

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• The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.

  James Joll

  Artist, History, Giving

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• The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Past, History, Tasks

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• Truth is with the victors-who, as you know, also controls the historians.

  Rolf Hochhuth

  Truth, Truth Is, Knows

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• The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source among the stars.

  Robert Bauval

  Stars, Egypt, Rivers

  Robert Bauval (2007). “The Egypt Code”, p.33, Red Wheel Weiser

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• Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.

  Thomas Piketty

  Issues, Important, Distribution Of Wealth

  Thomas Piketty (2014). “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, p.2, Harvard University Press

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• Environmental historians . . . insist that we have got to go . . . down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history. Here we will discover even more fundamental forces at work over time. And to appreciate those forces we must now and then get out of parliamentary chambers, out of birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air. It is time we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them.

  Donald Worster

  Air, Doors, Shoes

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• There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.

  Donald Worster

  Perspective, Environmental, Lag

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• Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Truth, Giving

  George Eliot (2016). “Daniel Deronda”, p.133, George Eliot

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• Events are moving so fast and what in one moment seems impossible, the next is happening. I'm sure historians will, in time, provide theories and analysis, but for now I think most of us simply want the tide stemmed.

  Lucy Powell

  Moving, Thinking, Events

  "Economic bail-out aims to restore confidence for small firms and savers" by Lucy Powell, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 2008.

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• That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.

  D. James Kennedy

  Education, Atheism, Unbelief

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