Top 111 Historians Quotes

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

You’re making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you’re not going to go and see it. I’d rather see paint dry.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn’t have the best eye for detail – and, for a Jew, he doesn’t have the best eye for retail, either.

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.

I’ve said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it.

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers – Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included – have written historical novels.

‘The Tudors’ was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

Historians are a long way from being key workers. The best place for them is at home, reading their books and keeping out of the way.

Historians still often see the end of the war as meaning nothing more for Germany than lost territories, lost participation in colonization, and lost assets for the state and individuals. They frequently overlook the most serious loss that Germany suffered.

Historians will look back and say, ‘Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.’ Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.

Historians will likely give Obama credit for steering the country away from the brink of economic collapse in 2009.

Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.

Historians tell us that a gentleman named John Ball once captured eight British Amateur titles.

Traditionally, historians thought in terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons. It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn’t change as much as thought. The people stay put but are reculturalized by some new dominant culture.

You’re not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous. They are very good at imagining character: that’s why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources. Full stop.

The idea that historians aren’t affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.

‘Rome’ plays on universal human emotions that hopefully people can relate to. Historians are always going to be offended by it.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can’t be disproved or shown to be false.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

Museums and galleries do recruit art historians, but they are overwhelmingly white and middle class, or else from abroad. They understandably fret about the lack of diversity in their curating departments, but is it any wonder?

When historians write the last pages of their books, and the producers of history documentaries sit down to edit the final minutes of their programmes, there is often a strong urge to look to the future and emphasise the positive.

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz’s spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.

We should show Chernobyl to the world: scientists, environmental specialists, historians and tourists.

So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there – fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding.

In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones.

President Obama had a few historians at the White House for a couple of dinners. I was lucky enough to be one of those asked, and he was very interested in Ronald Reagan, and I came away feeling that.

We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

There are all kinds of historians and scholars who say that Brutus could have been a son of Caesar. That’s definitely a possibility. He’s a generation younger than Caesar.

World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian’s footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

Historians don’t really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.

Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don’t know very much in economics.

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they’re great fun to write about.