Historian Quotes - Page 13

• The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.

  Erwin Panofsky

  Art, Might, Laconic

  Erwin Panofsky (1955). “Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history”

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• I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.

  Boyd K. Packer

  Uplifting, Hurt, Hard Times

  "Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History". Book edited by George D. Smith, April 1992.

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• The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.

  Ernst Junger

  Games, Play, Wave

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• No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Men, Solitude

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.206, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.

  Stewart Brand

  Dark, Age, Statistics

  Stewart Brand (1999). “The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility”, p.92, Basic Books

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• It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.

  Mircea Eliade

  Embarrassing Questions, Answers, Problem

  Mircea Eliade (2013). “The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion”, p.72, University of Chicago Press

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• Change from below, the formulation of demands from the populace to end unacceptable injustice, supported by direct action, has played a far larger part in shaping British democracy than most constitutional lawyers, political commentators, historians or statesmen have ever cared to admit. Direct action in a democratic society is fundamentally an educational exercise.

  Tony Benn

  Educational, Exercise, Direct Action

  "New Politics" Magazine, 1970.

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• The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Sports, Believe, Games

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• I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Dark, Years

  Chris Hedges (2014). “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, p.3, PublicAffairs

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• Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.

  Robert M. Utley

  Character, Two, Research

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• Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Truth, Giving

  George Eliot (2016). “Daniel Deronda”, p.133, George Eliot

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• The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

  F. F. Bruce

  Unbiased, Christ, Julius

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• Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.

  Robert the Bruce

  Liars, Hero, England

  "Fictional character: Robert the Bruce". "Braveheart", 1995.

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• Ghostly legends dot the Prairie State from its big cities to its small towns. These stories make each community unique in a way that no other landmark ever could But Michael Kleen understands that these ghosts are more than just stories. As a folklorist and historian, Kleen shows readers the connection between our past and our present. Haunting Illinois is more than just a ghostly travel guide, it’s an adventure offering new insight on the haunts you know, but also takes you on a trip to the spirits in your own backyard.

  Jeff Belanger

  Adventure, Unique, Past

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• Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

  Adam Hochschild

  Missing, Chance, Notes

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• It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Mistake, Past, Men

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• If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

  Henri Pirenne

  Love Life, Eye, Stuff

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• The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

  Louis Moreau Gottschalk

  History, Historical, Variables

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• Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Memorable, Men, World

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.43, Courier Corporation

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• In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.

  David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech

  May, Empires, Way

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• If there were even one spark of evidence from antiquity that Jesus even may have gotten married, then as a historian, I would have to weigh this evidence against the total absence of such information in either Scripture or the early church traditions. But there is no such spark-not a scintilla of evidence-anywhere in historical sources. Even where one might expect to find such claims in the bizarre, second-century, apocryphal gospels...there is no reference that Jesus ever got married.

  Paul L. Maier

  Jesus, Historical, Church

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• The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source among the stars.

  Robert Bauval

  Stars, Egypt, Rivers

  Robert Bauval (2007). “The Egypt Code”, p.33, Red Wheel Weiser

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• History never repeats itself, historians do.

  Lee Benson

  Repeats

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• A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Gratitude, Research, Might

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• Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.

  Victor Hugo

  Writing, Play, Tyrants

  "Les misérables".

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