There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.
I have insane curiosity as to what happened in all these events. I will never know. I'm not a researcher. I don't possess that kind of mind. I have a researcher who compiles the fact sheets and chronologies that allow me to write these big books of mine.
Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.
Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.
The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.
For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.
I'm a golfer not a history major.
A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.
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?
The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.
To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
I'm just a normal guy and blue-collar historian, and people keep tuning in.
History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
I think 'Historian' is ultimately a positive record, but I was a little bit worried about taking people into a dark world. I tried to do it with as much care as possible, but it's not easy to ask people to think about death or loss or confusion.
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.
The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.
We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
