Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
Historians of European royalty have written of the king's 'two bodies' : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.
There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.
There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.
There may be fewer women historians writing on traditionally 'male' subjects, but they are outstanding in the field - like Margaret MacMillan.
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.
Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.
I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.
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.
Historians spend their days engaged in the literally endless task of reshaping and expanding our view of the past, while statues are fixed and inflexible.
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men.
'The Tudors' was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.
There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.
Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.
The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.
Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.
Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.
I've always been captivated by the Voynich Manuscript - the mysterious, 15th-century encrypted codex that still baffles cryptologists, linguists, and historians.
Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.
Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.
You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.
Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.
Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.
The theory of permanent Muslim-Christian enmity, though it flourishes in the caves of Tora Bora and parts of the American academy, was long ago exploded by the historians.
There are all kinds of historians and scholars who say that Brutus could have been a son of Caesar. That's definitely a possibility. He's a generation younger than Caesar.
I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.
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.
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.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
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.
Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.
Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.
One of the things historians do is we look for patterns. And in many ways, Donald Trump is a very easy read, because he operates in certain ways. And he is the king of distraction.
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.
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.
I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.
We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.
Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.
Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.
Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.
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.
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.
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.