Quotes About Historians

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

Where I think historians can help preserve and actually restore democracy is to remind us of how we got it.

Historians of the sentimental school have sometimes regretted that royalty became absolute, while at the same time rejoicing that it installed plebeians in office. They deceive themselves. Royalty exalted plebeians just because it aimed at becoming absolute; it became absolute because it had exalted plebeians.

The Death Books Zahra and her forces were hunting were real, and they are referenced in Adams' Congressional testimony, as well. In my humble opinion, a full historical treatment of Henry Adams and his contributions to the race is long overdue, so all of you true historians out there, the ball's in your court.

America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

We should show Chernobyl to the world: scientists, environmental specialists, historians and tourists.

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

My basic notion regarding the matter of historical recognition is basically, it's a matter that should be left to the good hands of historians and experts.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

It's always 'a thousand years' in stories, even if it was eight hundred ten or fourteen hundred eighty. 'A thousand years' is dramatic, and drama means more to people than accuracy, I'll tell you that for free. That's how you get throngs of obedient morons, while the educated have to work doubly hard to keep records accurate. Historians and librarians have saved more lives than Healers.

The Chan tradition first acquired its legitimacy as a narrative about patriarchs, and, although some points of the narrative have been questioned by historians, the ideological function of the narrative itself has rarely been scrutinized.

It is curious that the two best-known British historians in the United States are Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, each of whom represents, in fact, a different school of serious historical writing, and both of whom seem to have gained for themselves, perhaps without intending to, a special reputation on the American right.

Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.

Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.

Although they sometimes claim objectivity, historians are the most subjective of all writers. Hidden behind the thousands of facts unearthed by research, they safely arrange the world to reflect their own vision.

Some historians, in fact, suggest Hartford recruiters may have pioneered strategies that spurred the great migration of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities.

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers, out of the irreconcilable opinions of men.

Medical historians have finally come to the reluctant conclusion that the great flu 'epidemic' of 1918 was solely attributable to the widespread use of vaccines.

Can there be any study of humanity, in 1946, without historians who are ambitious, conscious of their duties and of their immense powers?