Historian Quotes - Page 13

• I realized how valuable the art and practice of writing letters are, and how important it is to remind people of what a treasure letters--handwritten letters--can be. In our throwaway era of quick phone calls, faxes, and email, it's all to easy never to find the time to write letters. That's a great pity--for historians and the rest of us.

  Nancy Reagan

  Art, Writing, Phones

  Nancy Reagan (2001). “I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan”, p.1, Random House

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• To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Art, Past, Yesterday

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• If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Past, Purpose

  "Art on the Edge". Book by Harold Rosenberg. Chapter: "What's New: Ritual Revolution", p. 260, 1975.

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• Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Mind, Finals

  "Art and Other Serious Matters". Book by Harold Rosenberg. Chapter: "American Drawing", pp. 247-248, 1985.

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• Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.

  Lloyd deMause

  Psychology, Accepting, Mystical

  Lloyd DeMause (1975). “The New Psychohistory”, New York : Psychohistory Press

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• A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Able, Reader

  Mark Twain, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.74, Courier Corporation

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• There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

  Peter Greenaway

  Past, Knows

  "'You have naked bodies and genitalia, don't you? Why are you so adolescent?': Director Peter Greenaway on 'Puritan' Americans and the intense sex scenes in 'Eisenstein in Guanajuato'". Interview with Gary M. Kramer, www.salon.com. February 4, 2016.

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• Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

  Peter Greenaway

  Liars, Good Writers, Knows

  "'You have naked bodies and genitalia, don't you? Why are you so adolescent?': Director Peter Greenaway on 'Puritan' Americans and the intense sex scenes in 'Eisenstein in Guanajuato'". Interview with Gary M. Kramer, www.salon.com. February 4, 2016.

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• Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

  Peter Greenaway

  Good Writers

  "'You have naked bodies and genitalia, don't you? Why are you so adolescent?': Director Peter Greenaway on 'Puritan' Americans and the intense sex scenes in 'Eisenstein in Guanajuato'". Interview with Gary M. Kramer, www.salon.com. February 4, 2016.

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• Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

  Peter Greenaway

  Fall, Empires, Decline

  "'You have naked bodies and genitalia, don't you? Why are you so adolescent?': Director Peter Greenaway on 'Puritan' Americans and the intense sex scenes in 'Eisenstein in Guanajuato'". Interview with Gary M. Kramer, www.salon.com. February 4, 2016.

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• After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Years, Two

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Now of course we have Black historians, but they're usually men. We get the perspective always, the slanted perspective, of what has happened. The battles, the things achieved, the laws, but where are the people, the families? What happens inside the houses, inside the minds and the hearts? That's what I'm interested in.

  Isabel Allende

  Heart, Men, Law

  "Author Isabel Allende". "Tell Tavis" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. May 12, 2010.

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• We have all the technology to record things in the streets. Now the historians cannot twist it or change it, because we have cellular phones or video cameras, and we are filming in the streets what's going on. We have the voices of everybody recorded. There's too much recording and I think that's wonderful.

  Isabel Allende

  Technology, Thinking, Phones

  "Author Isabel Allende". "Tell Tavis" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. May 12, 2010.

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• Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it.

  Laura Mullen

  Uc Berkeley, Political, Degrees

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm a professional historian. I do my research. I have a PhD. What does my race have to do with it?

  Nell Irvin Painter

  Race, Doe, Research

  Source: bigthink.com

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• In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Art, School, Islands

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• I think a bigger difference with social media is going to be things like the impact Instagram will have for historians. For the longest time, we had no images of the past. And then when we had the advent of the camera, we had a record of the things people chose to photograph, which, for a while, were portraits of your family, a new building we built, or a really big horse. Well now we have images of everything. That will be the biggest difference I think - that we will have a visual record of this reality in a way that will be completely covered.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Horse, Past, Reality

  "Chuck Klosterman: The future will be worse than you think". Interview with Chris Weller, www.businessinsider.com. June 6, 2016.

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• I know that Arnold Toynby, the great historian, said he had always hoped the religions of the world would evolve until they began to bring the very best of each tradition into one tradition. He hoped that Christianity would be the one religion that finally incorporated the values of Hinduism and Buddhism, and enriched itself with them.

  John Shelby Spong

  Buddhism, Would Be, World

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I'm really mad for art history and the masters mostly.

  Robert Barry

  Art, School, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• What happened in the interim is, billions of records have been digitized. Historians and scholars have always used genealogical records to tell the story of American history. It takes months and years of research. I can't even tell you how laborious that is. You have to be somebody who has a lot of free time, like a professor who can take tenure or someone with a great deal of leisure.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Years, Stories, Records

  "Black Ancestry Matters on 'Finding Your Roots'". Interview with Alexandra Phanor-Faury, www.ebony.com. January 26, 2016.

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• I'm a horrible historian. My memory is bad. I read things and then I forget them. I can't understand dates and I can't measure time. Time is confusing to me. That's why I do a lot of manipulations of time in my books, in part because an orderly time is physically difficult for me to conceive of in my brain.

  Lucy Corin

  Memories, Book, Confusing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Believe, Teaching, Men

  "The Woman's Bible". Book by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1898.

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• A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized.

  Ralph Davis

  Past, Goal, Needs

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• Look, history is interesting. I read three books on George Washington last year. And my opinion is that if they're still analyzing the first president, the 43rd president ought to be doing what he thinks is right. And eventually, historians will come and realize whether... the decisions I made made sense.

  George W. Bush

  Book, Thinking, Years

  "Bill O'Reilly's Exclusive Interview with President Bush". The O'Reilly Factor", www.foxnews.com. October 20, 2006.

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• There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign.

  Peter Kreeft

  Atheist, Design, Brain

  Peter Kreeft (1988). “Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics”, p.27, Ignatius Press

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