I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them
But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.
I'm really interested in modern history, but to fulfill a History degree at Brown you have to do modern and pre-modern.
The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
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.
History is the science of what never happens twice.
At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.
To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.
History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
History is as much an art as a science.
The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!
I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.
I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.
The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history.
I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.
History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.
A historian should not be didactic-that is a word that makes my blood run cold.
I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
