Historian Quotes - Page 4

• How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

  Karl Shapiro

  Important, Events, Philosopher

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• History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

  Dan Simmons

  Dark, Historical, Different

  Dan Simmons (2011). “Hyperion”, p.231, Spectra

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• Historians still often see the end of the war as meaning nothing more for Germany than lost territories, lost participation in colonization, and lost assets for the state and individuals. They frequently overlook the most serious loss that Germany suffered.

  Gustav Stresemann

  War, Loss, Territory

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• I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Revenge, Rome, Independence

  Henry David Thoreau (2007). “My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau's Essays on Political Philosophy”, p.57, David M Gross

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• What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Art, Exercise, Imagination

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.32, Random House

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• Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Faces, Prophet

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• Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

  Gordon Bell

  Computer, Scientist, Computing

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• Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Hard Work, Telephones, Stories

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• I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.

  Eugene McCarthy

  Running, Art, Book

  Eugene J. McCarthy (1987). “Up'til Now: A Memoria”, Harcourt

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• I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.

  Studs Terkel

  Hands, Differences, Long

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• Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

  Samuel Johnson

  Historical, Mind, Penetration

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Edmond Malone (1824). “The life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., comprehending an account of his studies, and numerous works, in chronological order: a series of his epistolary correspondence and conversations with many eminent persons; and various original pieces of his composition, never before published; the whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century during which he flourished”, p.373

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• The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.

  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

  Memories, History, Challenges

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• For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Mother, Past, Hatred

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• The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.'
  The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.

  David Cannadine

  Jobs, Simple, History

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• You know, this is such a rich time that we've just been involved in, and there's really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it's important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.

  Dennis Hopper

  Jobs, Thinking, Years

  Dennis Hopper, Nick Dawson (2012). “Dennis Hopper: Interviews”, p.178, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity.

  John Dryden

  Truth, Mean, Helping

  John Dryden (1808). “The works of John Dryden: now first collected in eighteen volumes. Illustrated with notes, historical, critical, and explanatory, and a life of the author”, p.37

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• The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

  Goldwin Smith

  Sympathy, Party, Humanity

  Goldwin Smith (1881). “Lectures and Essays”, New York : Macmillan

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• Historians of a generation ago were often shocked by the violence with which scientists rejected the history of their own subject as irrelevant; they could not understand how the members of any academic profession could fail to be intrigued by the study of their own cultural heritage. What these historians did not grasp was that scientists will welcome the history of science only when it has been demonstrated that this discipline can add to our understanding of science itself and thus help to produce, in some sense, better scientists.

  I. Bernard Cohen

  Science, Discipline, Understanding

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• The enjoyments of elegant life you early chose to abandon, preferring to wander for many successive years over the rudest portions of Europe and Asia-regions new to Science-in the hope, happily realized, of winning new truths.
  By a rare union of favourable circumstances, and of personal qualifications equally rare, you have thus been enabled to become the recognized Interpreter and Historian (not without illustrious aid) of the Silurian Period.

  John Jeremiah Bigsby

  Life, Science, Winning

  John Jeremiah Bigsby (1868). “Thesaurus Siluricus: The Flora and Fauna of the Silurian Period, with Addenda (from Recent Acquisitions)”, p.3

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• Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dating, Long, Religion

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• It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.

  Gore Vidal

  Teacher, Simple, Sea

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• No historian should be trusted implicitly.

  George Kitson Clark

  History, Should, Trusted

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• History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

  George Santayana

  Kings, History, Interesting

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.378, 谷月社

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• The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Unique, Events, Doe

  "Philosophy in a New Key". Book by Susanne Langer, 1941.

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• I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.

  Dennis Prager

  America, Asking, Moral

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