The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.
As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.
I was born knowing that I had to be a painter, because my father, an art historian, always presented painting as the only acceptable thing in life.
What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?
I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.
Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.
History never repeats itself, historians do.
An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.
I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?
No historian should be trusted implicitly.
I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.
Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human. . . . Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments.