Historian Quotes

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.

I didn't realize the president was such an historian.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

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.

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.

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.

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.

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.