Quotes About Historian

Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.

As one historian of slavery and capitalism concluded: "The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced migrants

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

It is safest for the historian, if he values accuracy, to wait till a thing has happened before writing about it.

Matthew is caught tinkering with the facts. His reliability as a historian is severely crippled.

without the naval power to counter the French advance, "the Chinese government," as one historian has written, turned to warriors of another kind—"its mapmakers."6 Various maps were promulgated between 1933 and 1935 that asserted Chinese sovereignty into the South China Sea, reaching almost a thousand miles from the Chinese mainland

The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. "It is impossible to escape the conclusion," the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, "that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.

To (the British), the Gandhi-Irwin pact had merely brought about the end of a temporarily troublesome situation. They still had no inkling of the depth of the Indian revolution that Gandhi was unleashing nor of how it was being kindled by a resurgent Indian nationalism, a nationalism that across the Himalayas was also beginning to stir China to throw off foreign domination, and that one American historian, Hans Kohn, already believed was turning into what he called The Revolt of Asia.

The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him.

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian? The

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

The myriad factors affecting innovativeness make the historian's task paradoxically easier, by converting societal variation in innovativeness into essentially a random variable. That means that, over a large enough area (such as a whole continent) at any particular time, some proportion of societies is likely to be innovative.

un historiador serio y, como tal, un enemigo jurado de la industria de la memoria

If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

I wanted to work in the arts. My dream come true would be to be an architectural historian and work with the royal palaces and all the fabulous art collections. But I'm not committed enough.

My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.

The Romans themselves had always dreaded that this might be their destiny. As Sallust, their first great historian, put it, "There can be no doubting that Fortune is the mistress of all she surveys, the creature of her own caprices, choosing to broadcast the fame of one man while leaving that of another in darkness, without any regard for the scale of what they might both have achieved.

The historian Major-General Sir David Stewart of Garth described them as an 'excellent, orderly regiment of well-behaved serviceable men, fit for any duty' and the novelist Sir Walter Scott used his journal to call them a 'regiment of Sutherland giants'. (One of their number was Samuel McDonald, a native of Lairg, who was seven feet four inches tall. Throughout the army he was known as 'Big Sam'.)