Historian Quotes - Page 9

• The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

  Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

  Past, Hands, History

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• What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  History, Historical, Facts

  Edward Hallett Carr (1962). “What Is History?: The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961”

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• History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

  Donald Kagan

  Stories, Way, Explaining

  Interview with Bruce Cole, www.neh.gov. May/June 2005.

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• Problems cannot all be solved, for, as they are solved, new aspects are continually revealed: the historian opens the way, he does not close it.

  F. M. Powicke

  History, Doe, Way

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• I do not know how Vladimir Putin will be esteemed by the future history, but I have no doubt that among his successes and advantages for Russia historians shall absolutely note the fact of his not altering the constitution, for he created a precedent. And afterwards, no matter who might become president, it shall be extremely difficult to alter the constitution exactly on that point. Extremely difficult.

  Vladimir Posner

  Russia, Doubt, President

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• As historians, our training and discipline is based on documentary evidence,.

  David Dixon

  Discipline, Training, Documentaries

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• We are all historians in our small way.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Way

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.93, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I can see that you [Bruce Cole] are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

  Donald Kagan

  Different, Ought, Asks

  "On Learning from the Greeks". Interview with Bruce Cole, www.neh.gov. 2005.

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• I have made a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human.

  George W. Bush

  Responsibility, Decision, Looks

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• In contrast, Western historians, and those in South Korea, say the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Both sides agree that after the war began, the North Korean Army captured Seoul in three days and pushed as far south as Pusan before American troops arrived to drive back the North Koreans nearly as far north as the border to China.

  Sheryl WuDunn

  War, Army, Korea

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• Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians

  Terry Pratchett

  Country, History, Support

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• Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.

  A. A. Gill

  Happy Life, Important Choices, History

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• Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.

  Peter Earle

  Two, Pirate, Branches

  Peter Earle (2013). “The Pirate Wars”, p.4, Macmillan

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• Human beings are many-layered creatures, and do not succumb to the hegemony of others as easily as historians and politicians sometimes imply. Those Welsh, Scottish and Anglo-Irish individuals who became part of the British Establishment in this period did not in the main sell out in the sense of becoming Anglicised look-alikes. Instead, they became British in a new and intensely profitable fashion, while remaining in their own minds and behavior Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish aswell.

  Linda Colley

  Fashion, Mind, Hegemony

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• In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Bridges, Broken, Expectations

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2008). “The Narrative Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.136, Wildside Press LLC

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• Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human. . . . Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments.

  Robert Rosenberg

  Character, Accomplishment, Understanding

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• Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Ignorance, Arrogance, Combination

  "'Little Eichmanns' and 'Digital Brownshirts'" by Victor Davis Hanson, www.nationalreview.com. March 18, 2005.

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• The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

  Margaret Thatcher

  History, Politician, Hindsight

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• In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.

  Miriam Makeba

  Animal, Past, People

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• Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

  Claire Tomalin

  Past, Two, Use

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• Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Lying, True Life, Biographies

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The works of Walter Savage Landor [ed. by J. Forster].”, p.243

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• I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

  Penelope Lively

  Science, Past, Aspect

  "I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2001.

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• The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

  Agatha Christie

  Writing, History, Generations

  Agatha Christie (2010). “The Mysterious Mr Quin”, p.22, HarperCollins UK

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• Year after year, author/historian William Loren Katz continues to mine the lodestone of Black culture, and it is simply amazing how often he manages to find new treasures. Here, with the same insight he brought to Black Indians and his other books, the author traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West. He deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.

  Herb Boyd

  Book, Oklahoma, Texas

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• The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.

  Peter Drucker

  Rights, Important Events, America

  "Post-Capitalist Society". Book by Peter F. Drucker, 1993.

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