Source Criticism Quotes

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

I don't take anything that I read in the newspaper at face value on either side - from anybody.

In some Old Testament books, it's very evident that an editor has been at work. That's quite all right. It's part of the process.

You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view.

Don't believe everything you read in the trades.

I'd like to get to a state where people think that if you've Googled something, you've researched it, and otherwise haven't, and that's it.

The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.

The best way is not to read as much from the media and what they write.

All religions and cultures suffer from sources that preach hate against the 'other.' Throughout history some have, tragically, practiced what their sources preached, while some have sought to dismiss or even counteract the hateful words of their sources.

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

Sometimes you will hear me say right on the air, 'You just cited a poll that is not even part of Real Clear Politics,' which is an average, an aggregate. Yours is seeming to be an outlier. Give me the name of that poll and the date that it was taken. I will say it right on the air.

I remember when I heard the words "Biblical criticism" in my town, it was with disdain: "Biblical criticism? How dare you?".

Usually, historical revelations come from days of legwork, ploughing through piles of letters and papers in archives or even private homes, looking for the telling phrase or letter that someone else has missed.

We need to take a step back and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don't want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don't want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

If something comes on the radio or in print, I don't think there are any facts to it at all until someone shows some proof.

Most reporters who come to me get their stories directly from press releases. Very few do what one would consider to be their professional duty.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

I am only too aware that I am open to Rees's Second Law of Quotation: "However sure you are that you have attributed a quotation correctly, an earlier source will be pointed out to you."

Never use 'Politico' for a source for your story.

Wikipedia, eh? Must be accurate then.

As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.