Quotes About Historian

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma - a mirage.

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free.

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day.

My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion; but if I live no longer, I will, at least, live to complete it. What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?

My readings also led me to some of China's recent transformations that had made China almost unrecognizable to an historian.

Casi 100 años después, en 1947, el historiador Daniel Cosío Villegas escribió en su famoso ensayo La crisis de México, que todos los hombres de la Revolución mexicana, sin excepción alguna, habían estado por debajo de las exigencias de ella.

Of course people live in the short run, and the average worker trying to make ends meet during economic downturns in, say, 1841 or 1857 lacked the molifying perspective of an historian.

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!

I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.

LAWRENCE GOODWYN, THE great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People's Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must "connect with people as they are in society, that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of 'inadequate consciousness.' "5

he believed in the social arrangements of capitalism regardless of what capitalism did to him. Naturally, he was a positive thinker, and in his ability to overlook the world's cruelty and focus exclusively on reforming himself he embodied what the historian Donald Meyer has called the "social anesthetic" side of positive thinking.5

Not everyone in Paris was awed by Sartre's wartime politics. "Some wits," as one historian puts it, "remark[ed] later that Sartre joined the resistance on the same day as the Paris police." In other words: ten days before the liberation.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

A história é um conhecimento que se situa entre a ciência propriamente dita e a poesia. O saber histórico não é quantitativo, nem o historiador pode descobrir leis históricas. O historiador descreve como o cientista e tem visões como o poeta. (...) A história nos dá uma compreensão do passado e, por vezes, do presente. Mais do que um saber, é uma sabedoria.

Solo un poeta -ni siquiera un novelista y aun menos un historiador-podría describir la sensación de desesperanza que empezó a impregnar la ciudad de Arkaz a mediados de junio.

Only a poet—not a novelist, and certainly not a historian—would be able to describe the despair that began to seep through the city toward the middle of June.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

the spirit of an Heylin, who seems to count no obloquy too hard for a reformer; and the spirit of those (folio-writers there are, some of them, in the English nation!) whom a noble Historian stigmatizes, as, "Those hot-headed, passionate bigots, from whom, 'tis enough, if you be of a religion contrary unto theirs, to be defamed, condemned and pursued with a thousand calumnies.

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.

The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Jorl had said he would take responsibility for his son's education. Arlo hadn't reflected on what that meant; what an historian's sensibilities would do to the keen edge of his son's hunger for learning.