Historian Quotes - Page 32

• To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Book, Two, Cooking

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.76, Random House

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• All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology.

  G. B. Caird

  Destiny, Men, Names

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• Study men, not historians.

  Harry S. Truman

  Men, Study

  Harry S. Truman, Robert H. Ferrell (1997). “Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman”, p.187, University of Missouri Press

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• The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Novelists, Ragtime, Happened

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

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• 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

  Fighting, Philosopher, Arguing

  "The atheist". Interview with Gordy Slack, www.salon.com. April 30, 2005.

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• What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

  Oliver Cromwell

  God, Shaking

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• Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

  Yann Martel

  Real, Emotional, Fiction

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.16, Canongate Books

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• In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.

  Mark Twain

  Sarcastic, Jobs, Real

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• A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.

  Ambeth R. Ocampo

  Viewpoints, Lasts, Source

  Ambeth R. Ocampo (2001). “Meaning and History: The Rizal Lectures”

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• America has had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.

  Bill Nye

  America, Columbus, Made

  Bill Nye “Comic History of the United States”, Library of Alexandria

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• Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults.

  Merlin Stone

  Acceptance, Calling, Might

  Merlin Stone (2012). “When God Was A Woman”, p.250, Doubleday

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• Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.

  Moderata Fonte

  Believe, Men, Facts

  Moderata (Modesta Pozzo) Fonte (2007). “The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men”, p.76, University of Chicago Press

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• We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Memories, Real

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• Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  War, Civilization, Class

  Arnold J. Toynbee (1949). “Civilization on Trial”

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• The historian records, but the novelist creates.

  E. M. Forster

  Writing, Novelists, Records

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• Some writers may toy with the fancy of a ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the ‘Christ-myth’ theories.

  F. F. Bruce

  Historical, Unbiased, May

  "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?". Book by F. F. Bruce, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, p. 123, 2003.

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• For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  War, Average, World

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1990). “Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot”, Gateway Books

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• Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying the masters. Rock and roll was white kids trying to make black music and failing, gloriously!

  Steven Van Zandt

  Real, Kids, Rocks

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• Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems.

  Aly Khan

  Islam, Roles, Unjust

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• People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

  Dean Kamen

  Mistake, Writing, Simple

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• Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Past, People, History

  "Mapping the Nation". Book edited by Gopal Balakrishnan and Benedict Anderson, 1996.

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• Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Comforting, Comedian, Musician

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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• The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian - the humble listener - there has been a Divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.

  James A. Garfield

  Christian, Running, Song

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, 1895.

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• In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!

  Bart D. Ehrman

  Christian, Jesus, Zero

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• Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

  Steve Jobs

  Philosophical, Artist, Best Job

  Steve Jobs (0101). “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, p.25, Prabhat Prakashan

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