Quotes About Historians

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

Historians are not by and large inclined to supernatural explanations, but they are addicted to a near equivalent - 'inevitability'.

In the years 1889 and 1890, at the Ratsschul Library in Zwickau, about seventy-five miles east of Erfurt, someone came upon what turned out to be early fifteenth-century volumes that Luther had held and studied as a young monk. It was a spectacular find. Several of these books were works by Augustine. The marginal notes and other writing were confirmed as Luther's own handwriting, so suddenly historians could know what he had underlined as he was reading.

Historians estimate that up to half of nineteenth-century city residents were either boarding or maintaining a boardinghouse.2 Single

Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong.

Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.

Leave history to historians.

I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But - very rarely - I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.

Historians are a long way from being key workers. The best place for them is at home, reading their books and keeping out of the way.

Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors.

There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.

Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.

There are few historians who would challenge the fact that the funding of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War was accomplished by the Mandrake Mechanism through the Federal Reserve System.

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not.

The first convert is Simon Magus, a notorious magician who later tries to buy Peter's gift of imparting the Holy Spirit, an attempt the apostle severely rebukes (8: 4–24). In legends that developed after New Testament times, Simon became a sinister figure involved in black magic and the occult. According to some historians, he is the prototype of Faust, the medieval scholar who—to gain forbidden knowledge—sells his soul to the devil.

I think a Person who is thus terrified with the imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.