Historian Quotes

• Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

  G. M. Trevelyan

  Past, History, Historical

  57 Copy quote

• The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Past, Keys, History

  84 Copy quote

• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

  H. L. Mencken

  History, Historical, Novelists

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• The historian amputates reality.

  Gaetano Salvemini

  Reality, History

  55 Copy quote

• Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

  Ambrose Bierce

  History, Gossip, Gauges

  56 Copy quote

• The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

  Marc Bloch

  Lying, History, Giants

  Marc Bloch (1992). “The Historian's Craft”, p.22, Manchester University Press

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.

  Shailer Mathews

  Country, History, Gone

  Shailer Mathews (2006). “The Spiritual Interpretation of History”, p.31, Cosimo, Inc.

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

  David Drake

  Decision, Worthy, Humans

  David Drake (2009). “Patriots”, p.39, Baen Publishing Enterprises

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

  George Santayana

  Writing History, Needs, Written

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.378, 谷月社

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

  Frank Herbert

  Exercise, Past, Fit

  8 Copy quote

• There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

  Chinua Achebe

  Lions, Hunters, Hunts

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Dec 29, 2013

  358 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

  H. G. Wells

  Education, Appreciation, Witty

  Outline of History (1920) vol. 2, ch. 41, pt. 4

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

• History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

  William L. Shirer

  Light, Able, Speak

  54 Copy quote

• Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

  Ronald Wright

  Inspirational, History Repeats Itself, Repeating History

  Ronald Wright (2010). “A Short History Of Progress”, p.107, Canongate Books

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Poetry, May, Ought

  Miguel de CERVANTES SAAVEDRA (1819). “Don Quixote de la Mancha”, p.30

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

  Winston Churchill

  Inspirational, Positive, Badass

  70 Copy quote
• 

  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  "The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress", Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana, 1905-1906.

  138 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

  Paul Johnson

  Eye, Views, History

  5 Copy quote

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

  Errol Morris

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  32 Copy quote

• No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Greatness, History

  On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic "The Hero as Divinity" (1841)

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

  Winston Churchill

  Determination, Military, War

  Speech in House of Commons, 13 May 1940

  123 Copy quote

  Show source

• Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

  James W. Loewen

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.16, The New Press

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

  Herodotus

  Time, History, Eternity

  47 Copy quote

• Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Laughter, Book, Expression

  14 Copy quote

• Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

  Michio Kaku

  Clueless, Fiction, Today

  7 Copy quote