Historian Quotes - Page 8

• As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

  Margaret Atwood

  Past, Echoes, Light

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.311, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Every historian discloses a new horizon.

  George Sand

  New Horizons, Horizon

  George Sand (2009). “Letters of George Sand”, p.196, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Character, Details, Facts

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• A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

  Richard Russo

  Couple, Reading, Tired

  "Russo: Novelist, fan of first books". Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.boston.com. October 9, 2011.

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• Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due.

  Jon Stewart

  Father, Believe, July

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• Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Essentials, Raw Materials, Pakistan

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• Heart and head are contrary historians.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Heart, Head And Heart, Contrary

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• History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

  Philip Guedalla

  Funny, Education, Humor

  Supers and Supermen (1920) "Some Historians"

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• I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).

  Barbara Mertz

  Long, Doubt, Gold

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• The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Light, Community

  "Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction". Book by Kathrin Glüer, p. 213, December 5, 2011.

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• The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Passion, History, Disease

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• [talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

  Alan Bennett

  Jobs, Distance, Mean

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• The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Ignorance, Men, History

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• History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

  Henry Adams

  History, Rich, Pursuit

  Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels (1992). “Henry Adams, Selected Letters”, p.204, Harvard University Press

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• There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

  Glen Cook

  Lying, Self, Evil

  Glen Cook (2007). “Chronicles of the Black Company”, p.79, Macmillan

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• To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Taken, Writing, Men

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• Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Winning, Self, Views

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• A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

  Francois Fenelon

  Country, Time, Patriot

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• For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike
  time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists
  would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times
  the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.

  Fernand Braudel

  Time, Men, Color

  Fernand Braudel (1982). “On History”, p.48, University of Chicago Press

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• History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

  Max Beerbohm

  History, Doe, Repeats

  "The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm".

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• The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

  Robin G. Collingwood

  Past, History, Mind

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• I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

  Howard Zinn

  Numbers, Decision, Stories

  Howard Zinn (2014). “A People's History of the United States”, p.604, Pan Macmillan

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• America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora's box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover.

  Susan Cain

  Character, America, Personality

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• An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

  Samuel Eliot Morison

  Yield, Views, History

  Samuel Eliot Morison (1964). “Vistas of history”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

  Joseph J. Ellis

  History, Lasts, Chronology

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