Historical Research Quotes

• historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  History, Historical, Research

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• You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

  Tony Kushner

  Historical, Research

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• Africans and persons of African descent must assume the primary responsibility and leadership in historical research....if we are to continue to leave practically all important historical research and writing concerning the black race to the white man, then we must be prepared to accept, uncomplainingly, the white man's point of view.

  Chancellor Williams

  Leadership, Responsibility, Writing

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• I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.

  John Lewis Gaddis

  Past, Perspective, Historical

  John Lewis Gaddis (2004). “The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past”, p.22, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Past, Sight, Discovery

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• Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.

  Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier

  Lonely, Historical, Research

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• ... All that we may ever hope to establish in historical research are facts and conditions but never causes.

  Otto E. Neugebauer

  Historical, Research, May

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• Most architects work in ­studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and ­historical ­research were irrelevant.

  David Chipperfield

  Ideas, Historical, Criticism

  "David Chipperfield: perfect harmony". Interview with Jonathan Glancey, www.theguardian.com. February 3, 2010.

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• I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

  Iris Chang

  Skills, Historical, Gathering

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• The initiative of the Five Year Plan and of the accelerated collectivization belongs entirely to the Left Opposition, in uninterrupted and sharp struggles with the Stalinists. Not having the possibility of occupying myself here with long historical researches, I will limit myself to a single illustration. The Dnieprostroy is considered with right as the highest achievement of Soviet industrialization. Yet [Joseph] Stalin and his followers ([Clim] Voroshilov and others) a few months before the beginning of the work were decided opponents of the Dnieprostroy plan.

  Leon Trotsky

  Struggle, Years, Illustration

  Source: www.marxists.org

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• If one were to claim that the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq have been provided with "keys to heaven" by the Pentagon, would that need historical research to be disproved or would you just say, "That's just propaganda"? Indeed, how can you disprove the claim that U.S. soldiers have such keys? Or why should you disprove such ridiculous claims? It is the accusers who must provide the evidence.

  Mohammad Marandi

  Keys, Iraq, Heaven

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is no need for historical research. The war didn't take place a thousand years ago. Over a million Iranians served at one time or another in the war fronts and most of them are living ordinary lives today and are available for interviews. These stories are largely unknown in Iran and when I tell them to my friends or students they usually laugh.

  Mohammad Marandi

  War, Iran, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• So these liberals say historical research can't possibly discover the Jesus of faith, because the Jesus of faith is not rooted in history. He's merely a symbol. But listen: Jesus is not a symbol of anything unless he's rooted in history. The Nicene Creed doesn't say, "We wish these things were true." It says, "Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and the third day he rose again from the dead,' and it goes on from there.

  Gregory A. Boyd

  Jesus, Rose, Historical

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• My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

  Robert Darnton

  Taken, Historical, Library

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• My drug of choice is historical research.

  E. Lee Spence

  Choices, Drug, Historical

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• If it is impossible to judge merit and guilt in the field of natural science, then it is not possible in any field, and historical research becomes an idle, empty activity.

  Justus von Liebig

  Science, Judging, Historical

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• Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.

  Lloyd deMause

  War, Lying, Historical

  "The Emotional Life of Nations". Book by Lloyd deMause, 2002.

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• The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or another.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Science, Ideas, Historical

  Paul Feyerabend (1975). “Against method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge”, Verso

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• If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.

  Paul L. Maier

  Jesus, Easter, Morning

  Paul L. Maier (1991). “In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church”, p.203, Kregel Publications

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• Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

  Aaron Scharf

  Photography, Art, Taken

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• The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

  Thomas Piketty

  Passion, Discipline, Historical

  "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". Book by Thomas Piketty, March 10, 2014.

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