Historian Quotes - Page 26

• The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

  Edward Gibbon

  Errors, Race, Long

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.237, Modern Library

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• Food historian Jessica B. Harris says African American cuisine is simply what black people ate. When I think about what my family ate, we ate what people think of as soul food on special occasions, on holidays, but our typical diet was leafy greens and nutrients and tubers - food that was as fresh as being harvested right before our meal. Whatever was in season, that's what we were eating. It was being harvested right from our backyard.

  Bryant Terry

  Holiday, Thinking, People

  "MoJo Video: Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen". Interview With Brittney Andres, www.motherjones.com. April 10, 2009.

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• No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for 'Before Coffee'.

  Cherise Sinclair

  Coffee, Matter, No Matter What

  Cherise Sinclair (2014). “Master of the Mountain: Mountain Masters & Dark Haven: 1”, p.40, VanScoy Publishing Group

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• I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all; they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Love, Fashion, Simple

  Michel de Montaigne (1893). “The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne”

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• Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

  Lytton Strachey

  Art, Ignorance, Perfection

  Eminent Victorians preface (1918)

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• To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Giving, Culture

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.349, University of Chicago Press

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• I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.

  Junot Diaz

  Dream, Teacher, Book

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• Woodrow Wilson administration ended in tragedy, with his insistence on governing following his disabling stroke. I suspect President Wilson is often graded on a special curve, because many academic historians identify with him as one of their own.

  James M Strock

  Special, Tragedy, President

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• Historians write favorably, you know, for example, about Stalin because he was doing big things.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Writing, Example, Bigs

  Source: www.npr.org

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• The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

  Oliver Stone

  Trying, Big Picture, Ability

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Earth, Facts

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• Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.

  Walter Raleigh

  Love, Writing, Opportunity

  Sir Walter Raleigh (1829). “Miscellaneous works”, p.111

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• If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

  Simone Weil

  Past, Europe, Civilization

  Simone Weil (1962). “Selected Essays: 1934-1943”, London, Oxford U.P

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• History is too important to be left to the historians.

  Robert Harris

  Important, Left

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• Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Thinking, Bones, Suspects

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

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• Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.

  Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier

  Lonely, Historical, Research

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• For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

  Hilary Mantel

  Moving, People, Novelists

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

  Rick Atkinson

  War, Reading, Writing

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• There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

  Rick Atkinson

  Fun, War, Writing

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• John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Yale, Administration

  "Failed States". Interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, chomsky.info. March 31, 2006.

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• To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy

  R. A. Salvatore

  Views, Perspective, Enemy

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• It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.

  Nelson Mandela

  Fate, Misunderstood, Canon

  Nelson Mandela (2003). “Nelson Mandela: from freedom to the future : tributes and speeches”, Jonathan Ball Publishers

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• A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

  Joseph Conrad

  Artist, May, Novelists

  Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

  Virginia Woolf

  Party, Believe, Passion

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have approached the buildings as psychological and poetic manifestations - rather than from the more technical viewpoints of the architect and historian (which mostly miss the living spirit behind the forms).

  Clarence John Laughlin

  Missing, Viewpoints, Spirit

  Keith F. Davis, Nancy Barrett, John H. Lawrence, Clarence John Laughlin (1990). “Clarence John Laughlin: visionary photographer”, Hallmark Card Inc

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