Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.
We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.
The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.
As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.
Truth is with the victors-who, as you know, also controls the historians.
As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
I'm not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.
If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.
I'm just a normal guy and blue-collar historian, and people keep tuning in.
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.
What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.
To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies...
I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.
There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.
The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.
David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.
I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
I really love acting, but I also really want to be a historian, so it's really confusing.
Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.
It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.
As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.
What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.
Technological change is essential, but to a natural historian it often feels cold and distancing.
Those who read the fiction assume that, because I'm also a historian, I know what I'm talking about.
The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.
I'm a big historian. Big JFK fan. I got to take a picture under the official JFK White House portrait.
It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.
The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
It's the historian's job not to ridicule the myths, but to show the difference between myth and reality.
A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.