The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.
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
I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does
There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Reason is an historian, but the passions are actors.
Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.
I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.
To know John Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word. He understood that courage is not something to be gauged in a poll or located in a focus group. No adviser can spin it. No historian can backdate it. For, in the age old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity's approval.
No historian should be trusted implicitly.
An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.
Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.
Why did John Wilkes Booth do it? In My Thoughts Be Bloody young historian Nora Titone is one of the few to have genuinely explored this question. In doing so, she has crafted a fascinating psychological drama about one of the central events of the Civil War: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. This book promises to stimulate lively historical debate, and will be a treat for every Civil War buff who always pondered that haunting question, “what made him pull that trigger?” Bravo on a marvelous achievement.
Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.
History does not have sides, although historians do.
If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.