Gishwhes Historian Quotes

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. ~ Agatha Christie

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact. ~ Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

I'm a historian in my own mind. ~ Quentin Tarantino

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian. ~ Shailer Mathews

[T]he historian and the detective have much in common. ~ Ralph Davis

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian. ~ Jerry Falwell

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

The historian is a prophet looking backwards. ~ Friedrich Von Schlegel

Fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist. ~ Gertrude Atherton

Memory is a poet, not an historian. ~ Marie Howe

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily. ~ Karl Kraus

I'm not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up. ~ Douglas Brinkley

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

I'm a historian, I think history matters, but we don't have to be slavish in following it and restoring it, ~ Jack Granatstein

You are not just a photojournalist, you're a historian. ~ Bill Eppridge

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards. ~ Karl Kraus

Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian. ~ Lee Simonson

Looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We are all vulnerable. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

No historian should be trusted implicitly. ~ George Kitson Clark

The historian amputates reality. ~ Gaetano Salvemini

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian. ~ Hilary Mantel

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet. ~ Melvin B. Tolson

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right. ~ Alan Furst

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

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian. ~ Adam Hochschild

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

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.' ~ C.S. Lewis

The historian records, but the novelist creates. ~ E. M. Forster

A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand. ~ Karl Kraus

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience. ~ Peter Ackroyd

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible. ~ Niall Ferguson

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch. ~ Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

I ain't no historian but I happen to savvy this incident. ~ Charles Marion Russell

At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. (spoken by narrator Ava Bigtree in Swamplandia!) ~ Karen Russell

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

A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it? ~ Charles Stross

The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. ~ E.H. Carr

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. ~ Joseph Conrad

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

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

The Highlanders are Great Thieves ~ Cassius Dio, Roman Historian, 3rd Century A.D.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian. ~ Philippa Gregory

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated. ~ Henry Adams

As the primary end of History is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an Historian. ~ Hugh Blair

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact. ~ Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid ~ Lucian Of Samosata

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither? ~ Edward Hallett Carr

I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me. ~ Holt McCallany

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. ~ Hilary Mantel

[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present. ~ Fritz Stern

Certainly every historian brings certain predilections to the study of history. But every historian also has the ethical obligation to suspend judgment until finding the evidence overwhelmingly persuasive, the method beyond reproach, the results replicable, and the analyses sound. ~ George M. Dennison

A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn. ~ Samuel Johnson

The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization. ~ Edward Hallett Carr

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable.
-Professor Charles Homer Haskins ~ Jill Lepore

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, What happened next? ~ A.J.P. Taylor

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. ~ Hilary Mantel

I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip. ~ Bill Watterson

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Goldwin Smith

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. ~ Henry Louis Gates

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

I'm a professional historian. I do my research. I have a PhD. What does my race have to do with it? ~ Nell Irvin Painter

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. ~ Howard Hodgkin

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? ~ David Hume

The role of the Filipino historian must be the role of all historians. There is, of course, [Filipino history], but as rule, the role of the historian is to tell the truth-- in so far as documents are concerned. ~ Teodoro A. Agoncillo

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

The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves. ~ Ernst Junger

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian. ~ Howard Zinn

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history. ~ H.G.Wells

I think participating in GISHWHES is a crash course in facing our fears: people go to crowded shopping malls wearing scuba gear, order from a fast food restaurant in Shakespearean verse or jump out of airplanes among many other tasks. ~ Misha Collins

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it. ~ Susanne Katherina Langer

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. ~ E.L. Doctorow

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

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. ~ Peter Medawar

I don't have the education of an art historian. I've certainly read about art and look at art and have educated myself to some extent. But I'm not a skilled or thorough art historian and I wouldn't call myself an art critic. ~ Lynne Tillman

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. ~ Penelope Lively

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history. ~ Beaumont Newhall

If you are delighted to be in ancient ruins, you are either a curious historian or a romantic person! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit. ~ C.V. Wedgwood

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. ~ Penelope Lively

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. ~ Marc Bloch

A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life ... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized. ~ Ralph Davis

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation. ~ A.A. Gill

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did. ~ Michael Korda

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, and impress the mind ... ~ Joshua Reynolds

The only difference between the narrator of contemporary affairs and the ordinary historian is that moral judgments about the present provoke fiercer reactions and have more immediately practical implications than moral judgments about the past. ~ Geoffrey Barraclough

The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For ...
things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex. ~ Woodrow Wilson

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian. ~ Robert Darnton

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. ~ Buffalo Bill

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

It is a very good exercise, at least from a historian's point of view, to imagine oneself a devout pagan while reading various Christian writings. ~ Ramsay MacMullen

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. ~ Bernice Johnson Reagon

It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray ... We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian. ~ Winston Churchill

Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand. ~ Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier

I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man. ~ Steven Runciman

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. ~ James Harrington

As geology is essentially a historical science, the working method of the geologist resembles that of the historian. This makes the personality of the geologist of essential importance in the way he analyzes the past. ~ Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen