Historian Quotes - Page 27

• The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people's lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.

  Chris Killip

  Photography, Real, Distance

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• I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write.

  Wilhelm Steinitz

  Writing, Pieces, Chess

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• There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Book, Iraq

  Source: thehumanist.com

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• I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

  Tom Hanks

  Motivation, Reflection, Ideas

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!

  Mark Mason

  Reading, Engineering, Land

  "Career Spotlight: What I Do as a Land Surveyor". Interview with Andy Orin, lifehacker.com. December 10, 2015.

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• In some ways Jews and the various largely Catholic and often poor European immigrant groups were "white," as the historian Tom Guglielmo has recently put it, "on arrival." Where naturalization law was concerned, for example, ample precedents recognized their ability to become citizens, a right explicitly resting on their "whiteness." But they also remained, as Working toward Whiteness puts it, "on trial" for a harrowingly long time.

  David Roediger

  Law, White, Long

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The pioneer labor historian John Commons was not wrong when he wrote around World War One that exploiting and deepening such tensions as outpacing scientific management among U.S. innovations where bossing was concerned. Amidst the general miseries of proletarianization, workers also learned that one source of meager benefits and protections could lie in claiming a white skin.

  David Roediger

  War, Lying, White

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I had studied history at Brown and didn't feel like doing anything with it. What does one do with a history degree besides become a historian? And the professors in school, it seemed like they were just writing books for other professors to comment on, and vice versa - it was the most self-referential, boring world you could ever imagine.

  Elizabeth Neel

  Book, Writing, School

  Interview with Michel Auder, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 22, 2009.

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• One of the challenges in writing the script Call Me by Your Name was that I had to find something concrete for the professor to do. In the book he is some kind of classics scholar. But I thought it would be interesting to make him into something of an art historian and archaeologist whose background was the classical world. It's always difficult when someone is supposed to be an intellectual. What do they do? You can't just film them sitting around and thinking all day. And that's what the business of the statues is all about.

  James Ivory

  Art, Book, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.

  Russell Freedman

  Writing, Impossible, Individual

  Source: www.hbook.com

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• When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Thinking, Winning, People

  Source: www.achievement.org

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• If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong in the latter camp.

  Gail Fine

  Philosophy, Focus, Latter

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think there's no question that historians create; they would tell you that, I think. If I'm trying to imagine an imperial Roman position, it's much easier to imagine the poor schlub who's not even sure why he's doing what he's doing than it is to imagine Caesar. At least for me. And I'm intrigued, too, by the position of the poor schlub who *still* finds himself supporting the imperial project.

  Jim Shepard

  Thinking, Trying, Imagine

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As far as I'm concerned, the 20th century was performance-driven, but for some reason, the critics and historians didn't know how to integrate that.

  Roselee Goldberg

  Reason, Integrating, Driven

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Hurt, Loss, Law

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• I don't have the education of an art historian. I've certainly read about art and look at art and have educated myself to some extent. But I'm not a skilled or thorough art historian and I wouldn't call myself an art critic.

  Lynne Tillman

  Art, Looks, Thorough

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.

  Robert Dallek

  War, President, Doctrine

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• The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

  W. H. Auden

  Thinking, Personal Knowledge, Guessing

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• The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

  B. H. Liddell Hart

  Sake, Mark

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• The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

  Jerry Falwell

  Way

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• Though tax records are generally looked upon as a nuisance, the day may come when historians will realize that tax records tell the real story behind civilized life. How people were taxed, who was taxed, and what was taxed tell more about a society than anything else. Tax habits could be to civilization what sex habits are to personality. They are basic clues to the way a society behaves.

  Charles Adams

  Sex, Real, Civilization

  Charles Adams (1993). “For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization”, p.21, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

  Hilary Mantel

  Rivals, Biographies

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Upside Down, Dangerous, Capable

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• I've got to get the ultimate in composition today. or I've got to get the ultimate in light, I'll stay here until it appears. I was not making any demands. I went purely to see what would come, what might be there. I didn't have to be archaeologist or historian or tourist, I just needed to be available.

  Paul Caponigro

  Light, Tourists, Demand

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• Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

  Samuel Butler

  Past, History, Existence

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