Historian Quotes

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 discloses a new horizon.

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.

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.

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

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

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.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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

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

I tried, after I wrote 'Twilight,' to read 'The Historian,' because it was the big thing that summer. But I can't read other people's vampires. If it's too close, I get upset; if it's too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

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.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

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