Quotes About Historians

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Too often historians, beguiled by the theories of anthropologists and sociologists, fascinated by the possibilities of their theoretical categories, have forgotten that the Reformation was the result of a quarrel about faith and salvation.

When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation...they'll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages.

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."

More than a few historians have suggested that heavy drinking in colonial times (and well into the nineteenth century) occurred, at least in part, because water supplies were unreliable and could, in some cases, cause disease. Food supplies—often not properly refrigerated in an era when an icehouse was considered "high tech"—were similarly suspect.

I like to read about art. It also stimulates me to go and do something totally different in the middle of a sentence, or afterwards, like picking up a paintbrush for example. It is only that due to the overload of art historians, artists and other artrelated people, we are flooded by an overload of insipid writings, to such an extent that when you get to the right thing, you are too tired to read it.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.

It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

That is partly because of the new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put to it. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities

is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

For this reason, white historians think that there was no sun-dancing among the Sioux between 1883 and the 1930s, but they are wrong. The dance simply went underground. During all that time, every year some Sioux, somewhere, performed the ceremony. Henry

Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.

It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants.

Employ hindsight but humbly, remembering that life and death decisions are made by leaders in real-time, and not by historians in retrospect.

In their attempts to date Zen Buddhism's official debut in America, many historians follow the lead of Rick Fields and cite the significance of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago; others point to the subsequent arrival of a particular teacher. The undisputed fact is that it was not here until the twentieth century, and it was not able to flourish until a monastery was established at Tassajara in 1967.

outrage" (28). This is the perspective of the survivors, and it is one neither novelist nor historians, philosophers nor theologians should try to "transcend.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

Pi?kna struktura systemu feudalnego, tak pracowicie i drobiazgowo zbudowana przez historyków prawa, jest w wielu punktach tworem fantazji i nie wytrzymuje próby analizy, gdy si? bli?ej przyjrze? konkretnym realiom ?ycia codziennego.

There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study.