Contingency Quote by Anonymous

The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in…

— Philibert Joseph Roux

While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important…

— Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.

— Stefan Zweig

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating…

— Eric Hoffer

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

— Antony Beevor

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he…

— Georg Brandes

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and…

— Samuel Eliot Morison

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority…

— Leo Strauss

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts,…

— Howard Zinn

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

— Paul Valery

I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping…

— Steven Runciman

A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life…

— Ralph Davis