Historians predict the past for a living.

We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what…

— John Dryden

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains…

— James A. Garfield

“military historian Richard Holmes.”

— Clare Wright

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of…

— Joseph Wood Krutch

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Goldwin Smith

The historian amputates reality.

— Gaetano Salvemini

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians…

— Tom Hayden

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone…

— C. S. Lewis

“The historian will tell you what happened, the novelist will tell you what it felt like.” E.L. Doctorow”

— Anonymous

If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets,…

— Galileo Galilei

I'm a historian by training and by conviction. And so the thing that has throughout informed my thinking about international relations is history. I…

— Timothy Garton Ash

The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to…

— Gertrude Himmelfarb

Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are…

— Anonymous

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to…

— G. M. Trevelyan