Good historians...have the future in their bones

The reason I put so much energy into it at the beginning was that while there were plenty of people looking after the talkies,…

— Kevin Brownlow

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the…

— Paul Johnson

“It is a commonplace that good historians don’t judge statements from past times by the standards of their own.”

— Richard Dawkins

It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well…

— Herbert J. Muller

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists…

— Kurt Vonnegut

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also…

— Edward Hallett Carr

The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas…

— David Cannadine

“Rooting arguments in evidence and respecting scholarly norms, historians must craft stories that shape the future as well as the past.”

— Michael J. Lansing

“Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not…

— Edward Hallett Carr

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

— Kurt Vonnegut

“We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root…

— E.M. Forster

Social historians of the future no doubt will be amused by the fact that we late-twentieth-century Americans found it acceptable to discuss publicly in…

— Mary Ann Glendon

History--the product, not the raw material--is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon…

— Neal Ascherson

“History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses…

— Friedrich Engels

“It has become increasingly necessary to abandon the use of biblical historiography as a viable source for our own historical writing .. We must…

— Frank Charles Thompson