Historian Quotes - Page 24

• I mean everybody knows there's something wrong with the world and if you read left wing politicians or deconstructionists or thoughtful historians they will offer thoughtful critiques of our situation. But the question is, you know, the Tolstoyian question; 'What is to be done?'

  Terence McKenna

  Mean, Thoughtful, Wings

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• Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

  Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

  Writing, Imagination, Quality

  Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1954). “Collected Poems”

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• If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries.

  Philippe Falardeau

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: collider.com

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• What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

  Richard Lindzen

  Powerful, Special, World

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• I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

  David Burnett

  Visuals, Recorders

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• It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Photography, Important, Has Beens

  Beaumont Newhall (1984). “In plain sight: the photographs of Beaumont Newhall”

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• One of the most important factors in life, politics and war, to which historians tend to devote too little attention, is sheer luck, good or ill.

  Robert Rhodes James

  War, Luck, Important

  Robert Rhodes James (1987). “Anthony Eden”

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• You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian.

  Bill Eppridge

  Photojournalists

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• It didn't occur to me that I could be a writer until college. I saw all these people around me training to be doctors, or historians, or C.E.O.'s or whatnot, and I thought, Maybe I want to be a writer.

  John Brandon

  College, Doctors, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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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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• Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Party, Two, America

  Chuck Klosterman (2014). “I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)”, p.187, Simon and Schuster

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• Obama is not just a powerful speaker, but a thinker engaged with the ideas of his country and his age--this argument by historian James Kloppenberg should therefore fascinate anyone interested in American politics or how ideas shape public life. Tracing the influences of Obama's family, educational, and work experiences on his ideas, Reading Obama locates a unique individual in the crosscurrents of American democracy and continuing fights over American ideals.

  Martha Minow

  Country, Powerful, Educational

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• IT is an astonishing thing that historians will look back and puzzle over, that in the 21st century, American women were such hunted creatures. Even as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is trying to muzzle American nuns.

  Maureen Dowd

  Trying, Muzzle, Looks

  "Bishops Play Church Queens as Pawns" by Maureen Dowd, www.nytimes.com. April 28, 2012.

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• Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.

  J. I. Packer

  Christian, Religious, Heritage

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• What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

  Karl Kraus

  Writing, Enough, Wells

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• It is clear that everybody interested in science must be interested in world 3 objects. A physical scientist, to start with, may be interested mainly in world 1 objects--say crystals and X-rays. But very soon he must realize how much depends on our interpretation of the facts, that is, on our theories, and so on world 3 objects. Similarly, a historian of science, or a philosopher interested in science must be largely a student of world 3 objects.

  Karl Popper

  Rays, World, May

  Karl Popper (2005). “Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography”, p.213, Routledge

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• No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.

  James Harrington

  Men, May, Firsts

  1656 The Commonwealth of Oceana.

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• The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Philosophy, Reality, Views

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• I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

  Robert Darnton

  Want, Journalist, Spells

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• Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

  Jonathan Chait

  Perfect, Choices, Progress

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• Historians of the future will find it incredible that we mutilated babies by cutting off the end of their penises in the name of medicine. There are now serious concerns this routine procedure may actually deprive adult men of a vital part of their sexual sensitivity.

  Dean Edell

  Baby, Cutting, Men

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• Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. Cleopatra is impossible to put down.

  Rick Riordan

  Powerful, Egypt, Color

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• All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

  Carl L. Becker

  Determination, Persistence, History

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• Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory . . .

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Giving, Political, Prejudice

  Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington (1838). “The Confessions of an Elderly Lady”, p.5

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• A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Powerful, Self, Profound

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