Historian Quotes - Page 31

• It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Different, Able, Language

  "Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linghuistics (1910-1911)" by Ferdinand de Saussure, Pergamon Press, www.marxists.org. 1993.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

  Josef Albers

  Art, Tradition, Revive

  8 Copy quote

• Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.

  Spencer Abraham

  Thinking, Years, Doubt

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.

  Robert M. Price

  Religion, Stories, Narrative

  Robert M. Price (2008). “Beyond Born Again: Toward Evangelical Maturity”, p.75, Wildside Press LLC

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Hatred, Faithful, Way

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1809). “Don Quixote”, p.62

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Experience, Prophet

  5 Copy quote

• Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Wisdom, Reading, Creativity

  4 Copy quote

• The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.

  Philibert Joseph Roux

  Distance, Space, Order

  4 Copy quote

• To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

  Peter Morgan

  Novelists, Degrees

  Source: deadline.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Christian, White, Tragedy

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). “Strength to Love”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages.

  William Blake

  Simple, Men, Age

  William Blake, David V. Erdman, Harold Bloom (1982). “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”, p.542, Univ of California Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

  Matthew Arnold

  Men, Heroism, Mediocrity

  5 Copy quote

• If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

  Galileo Galilei

  Believe, Mean, Eye

  7 Copy quote

• The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light ofthe past for the purposes of the future

  John Maynard Keynes

  Past, Light, Together

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1971). “The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Essays in biography”

  98 Copy quote

  Show source

• For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

  Hilary Mantel

  Creative, Kind, Pornography

  4 Copy quote

• As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.

  Richard J. Evans

  Fashion, Virtue, Made

  8 Copy quote

• The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

  Antony Beevor

  Understanding, Duty

  4 Copy quote

• The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

  Stendhal

  Firsts, Ability, Qualifications

  13 Copy quote

• As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.

  U Thant

  Future, Air, Skills

  58 Copy quote

• I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

  H. G. Wells

  Jesus, Nazareth, Great Christian

  70 Copy quote

• I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.

  John Olsen

  Art, Thinking, Together

  18 Copy quote

• Let's give the historians something to write about

  Propertius

  Writing, History, Giving

  48 Copy quote

• [T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

  Fritz Stern

  Past, Two, History

  45 Copy quote

• A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

  Karl Kraus

  History, Backwards, Journalist

  Aphorism collected in Heinrich Fischer (ed) Beim Wort genommen (1955). Translated by Harry Zohn in Half-truths and one-and-a-half truths (1986).

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Civilization, Decline, Theory

  9 Copy quote