Historian Quotes - Page 14

• Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

  Philippa Gregory

  Thinking, People, Novelists

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• Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

  Kitty Kelley

  War, Men, White

  "Capturing Camelot" by Kitty Kelley, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 27, 2012.

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• I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

  Howard Hodgkin

  Art, Historical, Periods

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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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• Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

  Richard Ellmann

  History, Different, Literature

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• Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

  Alexander Downer

  Writing, Goodness, Wells

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

  Lion Feuchtwanger

  Humanity, Use, Records

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• It's interesting - an actor's research is different to just historian's research. I'm looking for things that I can actually physically use in the movie.

  Ioan Gruffudd

  Interesting, Different, Use

  "Ioan Gruffudd - Exclusive Collider Interview". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. November 13, 2007.

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• The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.

  Barry S. Strauss

  Sports, Imagination, Attention

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• That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.

  D. James Kennedy

  Education, Atheism, Unbelief

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• Events are moving so fast and what in one moment seems impossible, the next is happening. I'm sure historians will, in time, provide theories and analysis, but for now I think most of us simply want the tide stemmed.

  Lucy Powell

  Moving, Thinking, Events

  "Economic bail-out aims to restore confidence for small firms and savers" by Lucy Powell, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 2008.

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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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• There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.

  Donald Worster

  Perspective, Environmental, Lag

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• Environmental historians . . . insist that we have got to go . . . down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history. Here we will discover even more fundamental forces at work over time. And to appreciate those forces we must now and then get out of parliamentary chambers, out of birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air. It is time we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them.

  Donald Worster

  Air, Doors, Shoes

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• Truth is with the victors-who, as you know, also controls the historians.

  Rolf Hochhuth

  Truth, Truth Is, Knows

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• The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Past, History, Tasks

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• The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.

  James Joll

  Artist, History, Giving

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• For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

  Eric Foner

  Past, Allies, Events

  Eric Foner (1988). “Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877”, Harpercollins

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• The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

  Michel de Montaigne

  History, Meat, Middle

  Michel de Montaigne (1850). “Works, Comprising His Essays, Letters, and Journey Through Germany and Italy: With Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices &c., &c”, p.217

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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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• Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.

  Oscar Wilde

  Past, Age, Tasks

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• An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

  Will Durant

  Men, Play, Skills

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1954). “The story of civilization”

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• All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Jobs, Thinking

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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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