Historian Quotes - Page 7

• As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.

  Camille Paglia

  Spiritual, Thinking, Political

  "Camille Paglia defends David Horowitz". www.salon.com. August 26, 1999.

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• The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

  Howard Nemerov

  Facts, Responsible, Cases

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• I tried, after I wrote 'Twilight,' to read 'The Historian,' because it was the big thing that summer. But I can't read other people's vampires. If it's too close, I get upset; if it's too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Summer, Twilight, People

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• Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Reflection, Faithful, One Day

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• Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

  Hilary Mantel

  Memories, Way, Chronology

  "Hilary Mantel: how I came to write Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. December 7, 2012.

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• Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

  Hilary Mantel

  People, Shapes, Select

  "Bring Up the Bodies : A Review and Interview With Booker Prize-winning Author Hilary Mantel". Interview with Ilana Teitelbaum, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 9, 2012.

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• Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

  Hilary Mantel

  Vices, Hindsight

  "Bring Up the Bodies : A Review and Interview With Booker Prize-winning Author Hilary Mantel". Interview with Ilana Teitelbaum, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 9, 2012.

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• The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.

  Tony Kushner

  Thinking, Historical, Fiction

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• Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

  Hannah Arendt

  Responsibility, Keys, Effort

  Hannah Arendt (1973). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.53, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

  Reza Aslan

  Jobs

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• History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

  Esther M. Friesner

  Home, Reality, Gossip

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• We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

  Tony Judt

  Citizens

  Tony Judt (2012). “Thinking the Twentieth Century”, p.268, Penguin

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• Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

  Ernst Junger

  Believe, Opposites, Needs

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• Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.

  Lauren Willig

  Cousin, Reality, Historical Novels

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• As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Facts, Sometimes, Reaching

  Elizabeth Kostova (2008). “The Historian”, Little, Brown

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• It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Writing, Should Have, Epic Poems

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• I'm a historian in my own mind.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Mind, My Own

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• I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

  Mike Tyson

  Freak

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• I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

  Oliver Stone

  Trying, Doe, Dramatic

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• How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.

  Horace Walpole

  Littles, Circumstances, Vulgar

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• I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.

  Steven Spielberg

  Teacher, Book, Thinking

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• What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

  Will Self

  Feelings, Facts, Roles

  "Britain's intellectuals: leading thinkers have their say" by Alain de Botton, AC Grayling, Susie Orbach, Paul Gilroy, Will Self, Mary Beard, Brian Cox, Lionel Shriver, James Lovelock and Lisa Jardine, www.theguardian.com. May 7, 2011.

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• While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

  Colm Toibin

  Lying, Intelligent, Self

  "History students will no longer tolerate or believe grand narratives" by Colm Toibin, www.theguardian.com. August 10, 2013.

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• The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.

  Shelby Foote

  Memories, Dust, Imagination

  Shelby Foote (2011). “The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville”, p.815, Vintage

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• The historian is a prophet looking backward.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Literature, Prophet

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