Historian Quotes

The historian is a prophet looking backward. (Friedrich Schlegel)
[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. View quote
H. L. Mencken
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. View quote
Marc Bloch
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines. View quote
Marc Bloch
To Oliver Goldsmith, A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched none that he did not adorn. View quote
Samuel Johnson
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects. View quote
Herodotus
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. View quote
Oscar Wilde
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. View quote
E. L. Doctorow
I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field. View quote
Carroll Quigley
The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth. (Halldór Laxness)
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. View quote
Penelope Lively
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. View quote
Penelope Lively
I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education. View quote
Stephen Ambrose
[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals. View quote
Yann Martel
In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them. View quote
Ravi Zacharias
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. View quote
Henry James
A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries. View quote
Peter Medawar
Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality. View quote
Sarah Grimké
A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect. (François Fénelon)
The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can. View quote
John Dos Passos
The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts. View quote
Georg Brandes
What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind? View quote
David Hume
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible. View quote
Niall Ferguson