Quotes About Historian

One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with the means of recording and preserving thought. In the end, history is primarily the study of civilizations, because without written records the historian is thrown back on spearheads and pot fragments, from which much less can be inferred. The

No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.

The behavior of any human being is, of course, a very complex phenomenon, and the historian who attempts to explain it is indulging in a certain arrogance.

I am a cultural historian specializing in fashion, and the book you are now reading as part of an ongoing project on the relationship between clothing and sexuality. I am interested in exploring fashion as a symbolic system linked to expression of sexuality – both sexual behaviour (including erotic attraction) and gender identity.

True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell.

More recently, the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has maintained that justice, reason, and the love of humanity "are, in fact, predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values."19

Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle, a Cambridge-educated art historian who worked at Special Branch, the muscle behind British intelligence on national security and espionage.

In his study of Dr Leo Stanley, the historian Ethan Blue makes it clear that Stanley was no ordinary prison doctor. Dr Leo Stanley was a eugenicist who later became famous for a bizarre series of medical experiments conducted upon the prison population of San Quentin.

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.

Grief is historian of the heart.

...the historian must serve two masters, the past and the present. And while his obligation to the past, his complete, unassailable fidelity to it, must always claim his first loyalty, he must accept the fact that the choices he makes as a historian are not of consequence to him alone, but will affect the moral sense, perhaps the wisdom of his generation.

An historian is an unsuccessful novelist.

Along through the book I have distributed a few anachronisms and unborn historical incidents and such things, as to help the tale over the difficult places. This idea is not original with me; I got it out of Herodotus. Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects."

The rise of the Oligarchy will always remain a cause of secret wonder to the historian and the philosopher. Other great historical events have their place in social evolution. They were inevitable. Their coming could have been predicted with the same certitude that astronomers to-day predict the outcome of the movements of stars. Without

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

You don't have to be a brilliant historian to know that in Europe, messing with countries' borders, messing with their self-determination, their ability to choose their own futures, this is extremely dangerous, and that's why I think it is important to stand up to Putin.

Memory is not history, even though memories may be among the evidence a historian examines in constructing a historical past.

the issue in historical explanation is to explain the character and not the mere occurrence of events. A historical event is not an atomic, isolated, permanent thing but (as we have seen) an "identity" or "historical individual" constructed by the historian.

it is the historian's job to find coherence in the past, nothing in history can be regarded as accidental. For accident-mere chance or "fortune"-explains nothing, and a past composed of accidents is as unhistorical as a past of necessary consequences.

Johannes was something of a Renaissance man. First of all, artist. Then author, historian, archivist and even sort-of farmer. Above all, he was a thoughtful, loving and loveable human being who thought very deeply about the human condition

It is said that when the historian John Wheeler-Bennett came to write the official biography of King George VI, the Queen Mother asked him to tone down the many references to her influence on her husband.

There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-scientific' narrative method of the professional historian.

As a military historian Flood knew all too well the pitfalls of taking the easy road in times of crisis, of negotiating for today without an eye to the future.