Historian Quotes

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

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

The historian amputates reality.

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.

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

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image.

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

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

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