Quotes About Historian

I would love to be an historian. I'm a bit of a history geek and love books and programmes on the subject.

Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.

The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

I'm a big historian. Big JFK fan. I got to take a picture under the official JFK White House portrait.

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.

The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

As prominent Baptist historian Walter "Buddy" Shurden has pointed out, it wasn't until the last two decades of the twentieth century that white Baptist historians directly faced up to the proslavery, white supremacist origins of their denomination.

For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton's "works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.

Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

I am contented, happy, and consequently a bad historian.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

The Who quite possibly remain the greatest live band ever. Even the list-driven punk legend and music historian Johnny Ramone agreed with me on this.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway." "But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?"... "That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.

The army mustered by this new Macedonian Perseus, in 171 BCE, according to the Roman historian Livy

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian??ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

A text structured by the scapegoat effect cannot make a theme of this; [and in turn] a text that makes a theme of the scapegoat cannot be structured by this effect. In the gospels, Christ is so obviously the scapegoat of everyone [in the text] that he can no longer be the scapegoat of the text, just as the sixteenth-century witch isn't the scapegoat of the twentieth-century historian.

Fortunately for the historian, the court to which his evidence is submitted has no fixed term; interesting cases can be argued before it indefinitely. The jury can remain out for as long as it takes to gather the requisite data and come to a sound decision... the historian can watch with delight or consternation as the case is tried and retried by others, who may prove his hunches right or wrong." The Kindness of Strangers