Quotes About Historians

My tutors all said that the greatest of the wizards died many years ago and that their like would never be again seen in our lands." "Historians can be a pessimistic lot. I have never met one that did not believe that the world's best years had already passed.

In recent years, historians have broken with the essentialist notion of Indians as noble primitives capable of change only as a form of decay. Rejecting that ahistorical fantasy, historians now define Indianness as an adaptability that interweaves tradition with innovation in a struggle for cultural survival in a transformed land.

Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of 'postmodernism' I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

History does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it.

It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the 'invention of tradition' so interesting for historians of the past two centuries.

Yet because few historians have concerned themselves with the lesser gentry, the case studies which would settle the issue are scarce.

The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.

Historians sometimes view presidents very differently from the way the public did at the time. Sometimes they don't.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

spring. The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America's basic means of transportation for a century—wagons and mules. Yes,

Culinary historians looking back at the first decades of the twenty-first century will be blessed with vast quantities of material to study, thanks to blogs and social media, but all that material will still reflect only the lives of a certain swathe of active and self-promoting food lovers.

I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

No one can know, of course, accurate population figures from an era before there was a census, but many officials on the ground at the time and later historians, demographers, and anthropologists have made estimates of great loss.

A stability that existed under the Empire, was reduced to anarchy by the Rebellion, was inherited in turn by the so-called Republic, and will be restored by us. Future historians will look upon this as the time when a strong hand brought the rule of law back to civilization.

It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilization may be returned to the stability that promotes progress. A stability that existed under the Empire, was reduced to anarchy by the Rebellion, was inherited in turn by the so-called Republic, and will be restored by us. Future historians will look upon this as the time when a strong hand brought the rule of law back to civilization." Mitaka

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Historians still debate how many people perished during the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in late 1947: most estimate more than half a million but some think twice that, and at least sixteen million were permanently displaced.

We were always taught as historians, or at least I was at university, never to use the word 'inevitable', because nothing is inevitable in history. And that's true, except for German counterattack.

A story is a largely false account of largely trivial events, fed to us by historians who are largely idiots.

A story is a largely false account, of largely trivial events, fed to us by historians who are largely idiots,'" smiled the Witcher.

My opinion is that politicians should be humble in the face of history. And whenever history is a matter of debate, it should be left in the hands of historians and experts.

The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.