Historians Quotes · Page 5

It has always been difficult for historians to fully grasp the intelligence of painters.

— Dore Ashton

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

— Lynn Townsend White, Jr

History does not have sides, although historians do.

— Jay Nordlinger

Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.

— Thomas Frank

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

— Ernest Renan

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

— Nikita Khrushchev

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

— Tony Judt

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

— Edmond de Goncourt

The way we live history is not the way historians tell history. Our lives are messy and chaotic and bewildering.

— David Grann

“For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is…

— Hilary Mantel

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

— Peter Morgan

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it…

— Colum McCann

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very…

— Kenneth Baker

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

— Robert Black

There may be fewer women historians writing on traditionally 'male' subjects, but they are outstanding in the field - like Margaret MacMillan.

— Amanda Foreman

I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world,…

— Kevin Young

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a…

— Peter Ackroyd

Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic.…

— Jim Cooper

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of…

— Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this…

— Ronald Fisher

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on…

— Adrienne Rich

“When it is a question of ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place, [historians] cannot be too painstaking.…

— Marc Bloch

It's funny how sometimes historians sneer at journalists, yet they depend on us in the future for the material that they mine.…

— Lawrence Wright

Museums and galleries do recruit art historians, but they are overwhelmingly white and middle class, or else from abroad. They understandably fret…

— Munira Mirza

There's so much stuff that the normal person doesn't know that historians know.

— Jay Blades

Historians write favorably, you know, for example, about Stalin because he was doing big things.

— Jonah Goldberg

As historians, our training and discipline is based on documentary evidence,.

— David Dixon

“History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other." [ 1880 ]”

— Max Beerbohm

God cannot alter the past, that is why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians

— Samuel Butler

Truth is with the victors-who, as you know, also controls the historians.

— Rolf Hochhuth

It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to…

— Nelson Mandela

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

— F. Sionil Jose

How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers…

— Karl Shapiro

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.

— Jenna Wortham

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus,…

— Frank Herbert

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

— Margaret Thatcher

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the…

— Richard Dawkins

The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to…

— Bill Viola

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

— C. V. Wedgwood

“These muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time trouble was discovered and battles…

— Douglas Adams