Historian Quotes - Page 31

• The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.

  Gaetano Salvemini

  Jigsaw Puzzles, History, Imagination

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• We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Experience, Prophet

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• Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Wisdom, Reading, Creativity

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• The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.

  Philibert Joseph Roux

  Distance, Space, Order

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• When we see the human race, we must see before all else environment and food. Historians write about social change without taking these factors into account. This is why it is difficult for them to see the reasons decline and prosperity in society.

  Michio Kushi

  Writing, Race, Environment

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• The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages.

  William Blake

  Simple, Men, Age

  William Blake, David V. Erdman, Harold Bloom (1982). “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”, p.542, Univ of California Press

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• As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.

  Richard J. Evans

  Fashion, Virtue, Made

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• For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

  Hilary Mantel

  Creative, Kind, Pornography

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• I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

  Friedrich Engels

  Together, Balzac, I Have Learned

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• The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the future

  John Maynard Keynes

  Past, Light, Together

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1971). “The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Essays in biography”

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• It is certain that the greatest poets, orators, statesmen, and historians, men of the most brilliant and imposing talents, have labored as hard, if not harder, than day laborers; and that the most obvious reason why they have been superior to other men is that they have taken more pains than other men.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Pain, Taken, Men

  Orison Swett Marden (1907). “The Optimistic Life”

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• If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

  Matthew Arnold

  Men, Heroism, Mediocrity

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• Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Hatred, Faithful, Way

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1809). “Don Quixote”, p.62

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• It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Christian, White, Tragedy

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). “Strength to Love”

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• To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

  Peter Morgan

  Novelists, Degrees

  Source: deadline.com

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• If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

  Galileo Galilei

  Believe, Mean, Eye

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• The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

  Antony Beevor

  Understanding, Duty

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• A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

  Karl Kraus

  History, Backwards, Journalist

  Aphorism collected in Heinrich Fischer (ed) Beim Wort genommen (1955). Translated by Harry Zohn in Half-truths and one-and-a-half truths (1986).

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• I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

  H. G. Wells

  Jesus, Nazareth, Great Christian

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• [T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

  Fritz Stern

  Past, Two, History

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• The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

  Stendhal

  Firsts, Ability, Qualifications

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• As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.

  U Thant

  Future, Air, Skills

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• Let's give the historians something to write about

  Propertius

  Writing, History, Giving

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• I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.

  John Olsen

  Art, Thinking, Together

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• My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Civilization, Decline, Theory

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