Quotes About Historians

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Historians now agree that, relatively speaking, the years 1000 to 1300 in Europe—the period traditionally called the "High Middle Ages"—were prosperous and productive.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

Malcolm X looked at me hard. 'A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.' I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can't quite conceive him dead. It still feels to me as if he has just gone into some next chapter, to be written by historians. New York, 1965

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. 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.

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.

that we are the sum of all we've seen and all we've appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you'd read.

I'd known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny—and this was, of course, a lie.

I read that the real Cleopatra wasn't even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was." "Yeah, right. And you've seen a picture of her?" "They didn't have cameras back then, Squint." "Duh. So how do you know she was ugly?" "Because that's what historians wrote at the time.

Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and

History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.

If scientists could point to the fabulous interconnections of the natural world, historians should try to understand the past in a similarly intricate fashion.

Freemasons, anti-Masons, and interested historians will apparently have to live with the simple fact that constant repetition does not create truth.

When most of us use the word "myth" in conversation, we refer to something that is not true. When historians of religion use it, they generally refer to a representation of the sacred in words. When anthropologists use it, they often refer to narratives that tell about the formation of some social institution or behavior. None of the definitions, however, will hold directly for the characters and stories this book treats.

Snorri sets Thor in that environment; that is, he tells us that there was a historical figure whom the Nordic peoples called Thor who lived before Christ was born and who performed historical acts (it is important to remember that berserks and dragons were not as fantastic to medieval historians as they seem to us) that look very much like some of the myths about Thor that later were to be told by the Nordic peoples.

Most historians accept that Sweden was fully Christian by the beginning of the twelfth century at the latest.

The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.

In the end, the historians record rather vaguely, he pursued a course of slow suicide, embarking on a bout of massive over-indulgence which brought about first oblivion and then the death he sought – a death whose timing he had himself predicted years before.

The printed book doomed the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen. It ended his intellectual monopoly first of all because now authors appeared in print almost with the same relative ease as they appear online today. These included not only Plato but intriguing and hitherto remote figures like the poet Lucian; dramatists Terence and Sophocles; historians Plutarch and Tacitus and Josephus; and philosophers such as the Stoic Seneca and the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus.

With doubts about its ability to survive being expressed both within and outside its freshly drawn boundaries, Pakistan's insecurities were given full play in fashioning the nation's history. Using the "two- nation" theory as their crutch, state- sponsored historians wrote histories for schools and colleges as well as for more general consumption that highlighted the tyranny of the Hindu community in order to justify the creation of Pakistan.

Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

Events are moving so fast and what in one moment seems impossible, the next is happening. I'm sure historians will, in time, provide theories and analysis, but for now I think most of us simply want the tide stemmed.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.