Historian Quotes

The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

I ain't no historian but I happen to savvy this incident.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

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.