Quotes About Historians

For Krishna to be such an international icon, so to speak, means there are various perspectives on him. Saints, philosophers and historians have their own take on him. While reading about their perspectives, a story took form in my mind and that's how 'Krishna' happened.

Few American presidents are held in higher esteem than Thomas Jefferson. Though historians have scrutinized every phase of his long public career and found him wanting in a number of respects, he holds an unshakable place in the pantheon of American heroes.

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

They [i.e., the Greek historians relied upon by the writer] say also that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians [i.e., not the modern Ethiopians, but, the black peoples from inner Africa south of Egypt], Osiris having been the leader of the colony.

Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.

If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong in the latter camp.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

Novelists and historians have known for centuries that people do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.

All historians agree that the gospels were written down and circulated during the first generation after the events, while the eyewitnesses were still alive. In order for the gospels to be legendary at their core, more generations would be needed between the events they record and the date of their composition.

If modernity is, as I will argue, a global phenomenon, a Eurocentric approach is bound to mislead us. More recently, historians interested in world history have tried to see modernity as a global problem that requires a global explanation.

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously.

The psychological cement of this system was a culture of subordination which modern historians call deference.

obtruded on us by the Scottish historians.      [* Chron. Sax. p. 19.]      [** W. Malms, p. 19.]

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

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