Historian Quotes

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.

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

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm a historian in my own mind.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

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.

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

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

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.

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

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.

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

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.