Historian Quotes - Page 25

• The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.

  Barry S. Strauss

  Sports, Imagination, Attention

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• The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

  Clifford Geertz

  Mean, Thinking, Intuition

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• The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

  F. F. Bruce

  Unbiased, Christ, Julius

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• Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

  Tom Robbins

  Science, Animal, Past

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Another Roadside Attraction”, p.127, Bantam

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• If there were even one spark of evidence from antiquity that Jesus even may have gotten married, then as a historian, I would have to weigh this evidence against the total absence of such information in either Scripture or the early church traditions. But there is no such spark-not a scintilla of evidence-anywhere in historical sources. Even where one might expect to find such claims in the bizarre, second-century, apocryphal gospels...there is no reference that Jesus ever got married.

  Paul L. Maier

  Jesus, Historical, Church

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• God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Past, History, Knows

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• Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.

  Ambeth R. Ocampo

  Looks, Way, Facts

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• All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Jobs, Thinking

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• I don't think that boxing historians have been able to find a case in which a great fighter, or a fighter presumed to be a great fighter, came to such an ignominious end.

  Larry Merchant

  Thinking, Boxing, Able

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• An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

  Will Durant

  Men, Play, Skills

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1954). “The story of civilization”

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• You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

  Dougray Scott

  Dry, Documentaries, Film

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• I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. The would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

  Marilyn Johnson

  Teacher, Community, Police

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• A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Fighting, Religion

  "The atheist". Interview with Gordy Slack, www.salon.com. May 1, 2005.

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• Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.

  Oscar Wilde

  Past, Age, Tasks

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• What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

  Roger Kimball

  Civilization, House, Achievement

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• The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.

  James McBride

  Reality, Important, Thank God

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When historians get to write the truth about this completely unnecessary referendum [Brexit] they won't say it was a vote demanded by the British people to decide their national destiny. They will say it was the final battle in a decades-long Tory Civil War, at the heart of which was a fight to the death between two Old Etonians, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, for the hollow crown. A sort of Eton Wall Game. Where the poorest are put up against the wall and shot.

  Brian Reade

  Wall, War, Writing

  Source: www.mirror.co.uk

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• We cannot be spun, or at least we'd like to think that we cannot be. And the presidents who are trying to - too overtly to try to say, here is what you historians and what you later Americans should think of my presidency, 30 or 40 years later, they look silly.

  Michael Beschloss

  Silly, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Part of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to undermine and destroy unions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Practice, Use, Unions

  Source: www.iww.org

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• You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan - I was 12 when he was murdered - but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president. Many put him in the second tier, below the big three and surrounded by Truman and Eisenhower. Kennedy moved our soul. Changed our thinking about service and governance. And won big in the greatest nuclear crisis of the Cold War.

  Gene Weingarten

  War, Thinking, Soul

  Source: live.washingtonpost.com

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• History does not have sides, although historians do.

  Jay Nordlinger

  Doe, Sides

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• The spectator and historian of [Belisarius's] exploits has observed, that amidst the perils of war, he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment; that in the deepest distress he was animated by real or apparent hope, but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune.

  Edward Gibbon

  Real, War, Humble

  Edward Gibbon, Henry Hart Milman (1840). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.143

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• What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is - to use a word scholars love - problematic. Let's say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That's a historical issue.

  Elie Wiesel

  Issues, Historical, Doubt

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• Certainly professionally, yes [I was interested more in history]. And literary criticism, the structure of poetry. But it is primarily as a historian that I work, although text criticism and literary criticism are very much a part of my interests.

  Frank Moore Cross

  Criticism, Structure, Interest

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

  Alexis Ohanian

  Names, Knowing, People

  Source: thetartan.org

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