Historian Quotes - Page 5

• Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.

  Will Durant

  Love, Motivational, Faith

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• The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.

  John Keegan

  Writing, People, History

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• It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Historical, Mind

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

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• The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion.

  Edward Gibbon

  Religion, Atheism, Might

  Edward Gibbon (1875). “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.79

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• Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

  Robert M. Price

  Healing, Mean, Biblical

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• Concerning alchemy it is more difficult to discover the actual state of things, in that the historians who specialise in this field seem sometimes to be under the wrath of God themselves; for, like those who write of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy or on Spanish politics, they seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Writing, Wrath, Fields

  Herbert Butterfield (1997). “The Origins of Modern Science”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

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• Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

  Johan Huizinga

  Art, History, Historical

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• For if I should not believe all that is written by Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Ghost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; we distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, then what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men only.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Faith, Believe, Writing

  Thomas Hobbes, Richard Tuck (1996). “Hobbes: Leviathan: Revised Student Edition”, p.49, Cambridge University Press

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• Man you can define; but the true essence of any man, say, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln, remains the endlessly elusive and mysterious object of the biographer's interest, of the historian's comments, of popular legend, and of patriotic devotion.

  Josiah Royce

  Patriotic, Men, Essence

  Josiah Royce (1952). “The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown”

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• Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

  Evan Thomas

  Queens, Real, Discovery

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• Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Heart, Past, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.109, Xist Publishing

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• There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, History, Secret

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.88, Xist Publishing

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• Environmental history... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat. . . . The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.

  Roderick Nash

  Past, Men, Thinking

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• A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

  Karl Kraus

  Journalism, Prophet, Backwards

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

  Adrienne Rich

  Writing, White, History

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• How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.

  William Davenant

  Feet, Liberty, Heroic

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• Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see decline of empire.

  Jim Cooper

  Oxygen, Blood, Law

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• I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.

  Lauren Willig

  Falling In Love, Angel, Organization

  Lauren Willig (2011). “The Deception of the Emerald Ring”, p.258, Allison & Busby

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• If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.

  Charles Jencks

  Dating, Details, Looks

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• Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, History, Looks

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• There are two processes which we adopt consciously or unconsciously when we try to prophesy. We can seek a period in the past whose conditions resemble as closely as possible those of our day, and presume that the sequel to that period will, save for some minor alterations, be similar. Secondly, we can survey the general course of development in our immediate past, and endeavor to prolong it into the near future. The first is the method the historian; the second that of the scientist. Only the second is open to us now, and this only in a partial sphere.

  Winston Churchill

  Future, Past, Two

  Sir Winston Churchill, Jack Fishman (1974). “If I lived my life again”, W.H. Allen

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• The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For...
  
  things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Book, Simple, Men

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• Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

  Mason Cooley

  Memories, History, Creative

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• So many of the things we are doing right now as a country are things that lead to loss of a country. I leave you with this thought and challenge any historian, no mater who you are where you are. You show me a country that ever met its demise while as a nation it was honoring the one true God. You won't find it. Let's keep this country alive.

  Louie Gohmert

  Country, Loss, Evil

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• The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Truth, Writing, Law

  De Oratore. It is more important that these maxims be observed by U.S. intelligence analysts than by historians.

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