There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail - the bravery, even, of the lions.
All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology.
The long historian of my country's woes.
A historian has many duties. . . the first is not to slander; the second is not to bore
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.
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.
For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian, and there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill -- whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains quite simply, a great man.
There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.
Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.
The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.
Memory is a poet, not an historian.
Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.