Quotes About Historian

As more than one Marine historian has said, it's unfortunate to the memory of the men who fought and died on Peleliu that it remains one of the lesser known and poorly understood battles of World War II

the truth is that hierarchies of power and privilege won't disappear, every historian knows this, it's innate to human nature and inherent in all societies in all eras and equally manifests in the animal kingdom, so I can't pretend otherwise

Hitler specifically chooses Carlyle's book because it was the eminent Scottish historian who set forth the "Great Man" theory of history, which states that "the history of the world is but a biography of great men." Leonidas

In that moment of revealing, one historian will write of Cleopatra, "her desire grew greater than it had been before.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR committed a most visionary act: He appointed a Harvard historian to write the official account of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Samuel Eliot Morison was given the rank of lieutenant commander, with the right to interview anyone of whatever status.

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.

The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

In other words, if a patent forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical facts of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.

You're too cute, Katinka, for a historian.

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

My name is Ruben Blum and I'm an, yes, an historian. But my front-door was locked and I didn't have the key, so I knocked, and as I waited for Edith to let me in, I kept waiving the shovel back at the Sheriff and mumbling, "Turks…what did you expect?…just a bunch of crazy Turks…

High malice is almost inherent in the profession of historian.

The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.