Quotes About Historians

la natura, non l'uomo, sarebbe quindi responsabile di un cataclisma ancora pieno di enigmi agli occhi degli storici.

It is unexpected events, inevitable situations, the imperious necessities of successive epochs, which most often decide the conduct of the greatest powers and the most able politicians. It is after the fair, when the course of facts and their consequences has received full development, that, amidst their tranquil meditations, annalists and historians, in their learned way, attribute everything to systematic plans and personal calculations on the part of the chief actors.

Historians will probably call our era "the age of anxiety." Anxiety is the natural result when our hopes are centered in anything short of God and His will for us.

Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.

We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome.

It is no longer taboo to say that President Roosevelt required Pearl Harbor to drag a war-weary American public into supporting another World War. Discussion of FDR's foreknowledge of the Japanese attack is not only the subject of books by respected historians, but of documentaries on cable television.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

Why was it still possible, in 2006, to say something original and important about the events of 1918? Why had it taken nearly a century to see a simple truth about the single most deadly pandemic in human history? Only after three amateur historians studied the various interventions, and the various death tolls in individual American cities, did the importance of timing became obvious.

I really think when historians look back on our time they will not divide us into red and blue and Republican Democrat like the things that were wrong with us were wrong with both sides in different ways, I do think they manifest in a more dangerous way on the right. But on the left there is a rot and it comes from academia and it filters down.

That,' said Benny, 'is about as convincing an argument as the works of those historians who claim there was a fifth Teletubby.

By the nature of their discipline, mathematicians invariably do their best intuitive work in their twenties or early thirties—whereas historians and other social scientists often need years of studious preparation before they became capable of genuinely creative work.

Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.

Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians.

In reality, there are many little circumstances too often omitted by injudicious historians, from which events of the utmost importance arise. The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes. Thus

That our work, therefore, might be in no danger of being likened to the labours of these historians, we have taken every occasion of interspersing through the whole sundry similes, descriptions, and other kind of poetical embellishments.

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.

Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers' Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded: "knows a foreign language," "uses irony."128

This isn't about your reputation. Our job right now is to make sure that there to ARE future historians.

One of the signal virtues of Halbrook's scholarship is his willingness to let historical sources speak for themselves. Many professional historians who write about the Second Amendment expect the reader to take on trust that the author knows what people were thinking when the Bill of Rights was adopted.

The proof that these words marked the event… is the very fact that no other words have ever been recorded; and it is well known that 'historians' of the popular school dearly love to mark great events by the words which accompanied them. What reason would they have for ignoring words to mark the occasion except that these words fail, in their judgment, to convey the proper sense of the occasion?

In that Malazan Book of the Fallen, the historians will write of our suffering, and they will speak of it as the suffering of those who served the Crippled God. As something … fitting. And for our seeming fanaticism they will dismiss all that we were, and think only of what we achieved. Or failed to achieve. And in so doing, they will miss the whole fucking point.

The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.