Quotes About Historians

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also n excellent cartoon by Disney.

A la historia la organizan los historiadores; ellos la hacen coherente e inteligible, mediante el uso de puntos de vista e interpretaciones que son, siempre, parciales, provisionales, y, en última instancia, tan subjetivas como las construcciones artísticas.

Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not.

The guardians of Celtic culture, the Druids, did not leave written records. So most of what we know of them is from Greek and Roman historians who described the Celts as huge and terrifying men in bright fabrics.

Many historians, with an 'if only' approach to the British defeat, have focused so much on different aspects of Operation Market Garden which went wrong that they have tended to overlook the central element. It was quite simply a very bad plan right from the start and right from the top. Every other problem stemmed from that.

T]he best historians...take a thorough knowledge of the evidence of their subject and combine it with a sharp intellect, the warmest understanding of people and the highest imaginative powers.

Naiveté, optimism, generosity—we encounter them among botanists, specialists in the pure sciences, explorers, never among politicians, historians, or priests.

If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred.

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.

Museums and galleries do recruit art historians, but they are overwhelmingly white and middle class, or else from abroad. They understandably fret about the lack of diversity in their curating departments, but is it any wonder?

Historians of European royalty have written of the king's 'two bodies' : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.

The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and the narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

Lord Acton's famous observation that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak.

Historians, as Robert Darnton observed in 1980, 'want to penetrate the mental world of ordinary persons as well as philosophers, but they keep running into the vast silence that has swallowed up most of mankind's thinking.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

The only result of a horse race which historians can tell us with absolute confidence is one that has already been run.