Historians Quotes

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.”
― Mark Twain

“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A historian ought to be exact, sincere and impartial;
free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection;
and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual

“All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).

. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)”
― Alan Sokal

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).”
― Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence

“A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that unanticipated developments often lead to unintended consequences.”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,' 'Claudia, you must not answer back like that.' Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested.”
― Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

“I’m not sure you even know where your truths end and your lies begin.”
― Richard S. Ford, Stealing Orpheon

“A historian who doesn't want to make history is a bad historian.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“News is full of noise. History is largely stripped of it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Standing jaggedly on Senlac Hill, where Harold Godwinson died, possibly as a result of having taken an arrow to the eye - though possibly more boringly than that, some historians have felt constrained to point out, 'Dear, oh dear, you appear to have accidentally captured someone's imagination! Put it down immediately and return to your research on crop yields,”
― David Mitchell, Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens

“...and everyone discovers that people are not maximizing utility... they're murdering each other... and so then the Geopolitics gets let back in.”
― Stephen Kotkin

“She said, "Whoever heard of a colored historian?" Head up. Eyes flashing with anger.

He was bewildered and hurt in a funny kind of way. He had looked at her thinking, Why should you who are colored try to destroy me, discourage me, and why should the history teacher who is white, encourage me, keep telling me I can do this thing? Why do you want to hurt me? How can you say that and then turn around and quote your farther, "The black man can do anything if he sets out to do it, if he's willing to work at it, night and day, can do anything, can do anything.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“To be a historian is, at times, to be cursed.”
― Chris Kempshall, Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire

“Some historians, by prioritising accuracy of information and parading their attentiveness, diligence, and industry, emphasised only the objective of factual knowledge which might prove detrimental to their scholarly creativity, empathy, and synthetic power as well as their aesthetic judgement and broader understanding.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 16.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“The tide of nineteenth-century whig orthodoxy – with its unequal emphasis on constitutional history – subsided, in the mid-twentieth century, to reveal new approaches to History. In the Stubbsian realm of later-medieval political history, for instance, this tide’s retreat enabled the advance of waters which emphasised personalities and the importance of political connections and patronage networks.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), pp. 18–19.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“Description may require the study of individual documents which thereby stimulates examination of informational value: those actors, factors, or features populating the documentary landscape.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), pp. 30–1.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“The sphere of ‘historical research’ does not readily or exactly correspond with that of ‘archival practice’ but the notion that even if a single component of the latter is omitted from the former that that then validates the profession’s collective defenestration of all issues historical fails to appreciate the complexity of all arguments.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 41.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“A view of archivists as historians’ handmaidens accepts subservience, infers disciplinary subordination, and implies professional inferiority, which does not realise the scale and extent of archivists’ true accumulated expertise. Consequently, if we invert the proposition to pose not whether historians make better archivists but whether archivists make better historians, it is possible to consider not whether archivists should be scholars and engage in historical research but whether the realm of historical scholarship should incorporate archivists and archival activities.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 46.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“Playing the role which has always fallen to the historian, the role of the traitor.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the Universe.”
― Jack Freestone

“When history repeats itself, historians repeat themselves.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“A hint of this approach is offered by the historian K.M. Panikkar when he writes:
The service which a small priestly class rendered to a whole people at the time of the destruction of their political power is paralleled only by the action of the Jewish rabbis when the Temple was destroyed and Jews dispersed by the Romans. At the time when the Jewish people sank into despair, a group of learned men under Johanan ben Zakkai established the great academy at Jabneh in the heart of Roman Palestine itself and guarded zealously the doctrine of Judaism. It sent its messages to the Jewish people dispersed all over the world and thus saved Judaism for the future. That is what the Brahmins did in the 13th and the 14th centuries in the Gangetic Valley.43
Panikkar is referring here to the second crisis created by the loss of political power that the Hindu community had to face under Muslim rule, but he drops a hint which might prove helpful for us as we investigate the first crisis, to which the Manusmṛti constituted a response.
It so happens that the Jewish community also faced a crisis caused by the loss of political power in the first century, when the Romans destroyed its Temple in Jerusalem. Panikkar, in the passage cited earlier, refers to this incident and as to how the community was saved at this moment by the creation of Rabbinic Judaism, which was centred not on worship in the Temple, but in following Jewish Law as collected in the Mishnah, a compendium of oral law which was compiled through the efforts of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai. The fact that the Manusmṛti was similarly compiled around the same time provides an interesting parallel. This was especially so as its goal was also to save a community which had lost political power, by placing its focus on what we might call ‘social power’ as a counterblast to it—a society so”
― Arvind Sharma, From Fire to Light: Rereading the Manusmriti

“A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side--of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process-- of lawsuits, treaties, moralists' denunciations, literary satire, papal Bills. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something.”
― TUCHMAN BARBARA, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century