Quotes About Historians

Never mind,' said Mazer Rackham. 'The politicians are afraid of you, but they can't destroy your reputation yet. That won't be done until the historians get at you in thirty years.

The multinationals who'd been backing Darby and Gentilla lost interest, and time travel had been handed over to historians and scientists

What would have happened if Franklin had, in fact, received a formal academic education and gone to Harvard? Some historians such as Arthur Tourtellot argue that he would have been stripped of his "spontaneity," "intuitive" literary style, "zest," "freshness," and the "unclutteredness" of his mind. And indeed, Harvard has been known to

Zhang was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, and it's interesting to speculate on which of them will end up having the most impact on the world. It's a proxy for the larger question, which future historians will answer, of whether the digital revolution or the life-science revolution will end up being the more important.

Japan holds steadfast to the fiction that it did nothing wrong, that it was trapped by circumstances—the theme struck by Hirohito on August 15, 1945, and, unfortunately, perpetuated by some historians in 1995.

A "London Mechanic's Wife" made a point that historians should take to heart: Shall the idiot-like, the stupid and usurious capitalists, tell us to look to our domestic affairs, and say, "these we understand best," we will retort on them, and tell them that thousands of us have scarce any domestic affairs to look after, when the want of employment on the one hand, or ill-requited toil on the other, have left our habitations almost destitute...

Of course, some historians are quite content with the category "feudalism," which they adopt to explain pretty much everything in Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. We concur with Brunner that this is "a convenient cover for everything that one does not understand about the Middle Ages." 72

The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not so much the presence, in the twentieth century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

When historians look at the Obama presidency, they're likely to credit him especially for doing the politically unpopular things that were needed in 2009 to salvage the financial wreckage.

The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

I have a dreadful feeling in my bones that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: "This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up."

And if those things are textiles, stories about women's lives seem to adhere with special tenacity, even as fabrics, because of their vulnerability to deterioration and frequent lack of attribution to a maker, have been among the last kinds of materials that historians look to in order to understand what has occurred, how, and why.

Let us imagine the reaction of humankind's future historians and anthropologists. With the benefit of perspective, will they look back on our religious beliefs and categorize them as the mythologies of an unenlightened time? Will they look at our gods as we look at Zeus? Will they collect our sacred scriptures and banish them to that dusty bookshelf of history?

I believe that in years to come, historians will see the beginning of the 21st century as the 'golden age' of real estate.

Names like Christopher Hill, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, Guy Bois, Albert Soboul, Edward Thompson, James McPherson and D D Kosambi spring to mind.

LaHaye's claim that no historian to date has questioned this prayer book's authenticity is a flat-out lie. Historians began questioning its authenticity almost as soon as its discovery was reported. In fact, it had already been rejected by the Smithsonian Institution even before its discovery was reported.

Future historians could retrieve the mountain's records and re-create many hundreds of years of demographic history. Would they also discover that most humans from all of history were, in fact, Mormons?

an increasing number of court cases in which relatives of deceased perpetrators brought ideologically charged cases for defamation against historians and journalists who had examined instances of Francoist crime,

Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say, according to whether they want rain or fine weather: "The wind has blown the clouds away," or, "The wind has brought up the clouds." And in the same way the universal historians sometimes, when it pleases them and fits in with their theory, say that power is the result of events, and sometimes, when they want to prove something else, say that power produces events.

as is done by the newest historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not the history of the life of the peoples.

The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa