Historian Quotes

“Memory is a poet, not a historian.”

— Paul Geraldy

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

— Lee Hazlewood

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

— Lynn Townsend White, Jr

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

— Ralph Davis

We are all historians in our small way.

— Jeanette Winterson

The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.

— Lucian

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

— George Kitson Clark

Reason is an historian, but the passions are actors.

— Antoine Rivarol

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

— Peter Conrad

I'm just a normal guy and blue-collar historian, and people keep tuning in.

— Rick Harrison

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

— Anonymous

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

— Carl L. Becker

Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.

— Lord Acton

I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

— Friedrich Engels

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Peter Gay

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and…

— Rob Bell

Art shouldn't be locked away in galleries and libraries and books. Art should be for everybody and not just art buffs, historians…

— Julian Beever

Any political historian can give innumerable examples of one percenters who have gone on to success, maybe even Bill Clinton himself?

— Lincoln Chafee

The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you…

— Oliver Stone

I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but…

— Robert Barry

I retained no records and I am not a good writer anyhow. So the best approach is for historians like you to…

— Shunroku Hata

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became…

— Ludwig von Mises

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more…

— Rick Perlstein

I do not know how Vladimir Putin will be esteemed by the future history, but I have no doubt that among his…

— Vladimir Posner

The student of biology is often struck with the feeling that historians, when dealing with the rise and fall of nations, do…

— Ronald Ross

As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda--the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government--in their analysis…

— Richard Heinberg

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that…

— Christopher McDougall

In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or…

— Bart D. Ehrman

Year after year, author/historian William Loren Katz continues to mine the lodestone of Black culture, and it is simply amazing how often…

— Herb Boyd

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of…

— Richard M. Nixon

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant.…

— Newt Gingrich

“Give me a scholar, therefore, who is able to think and to write, to look with an eye of discernment into things,…

— Lucian of Samosata

There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history…

— Richard Lewontin

Why did John Wilkes Booth do it? In My Thoughts Be Bloody young historian Nora Titone is one of the few to…

— Jay Winik

The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into…

— James McBride

“The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner,…

— Margaret Atwood

The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine…

— John Maynard Keynes

One of the challenges in writing the script Call Me by Your Name was that I had to find something concrete for…

— James Ivory

To describe love-making is immoral and immodest; you know it is. To describe it as it really is, or would appear to…

— William Makepeace Thackeray