Historians Quotes

The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers.

Historians in the future will surely wonder what went so wrong when the United States, for the first time ever, focused its foreign policy on the Islamic world.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and around him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less hostile since Congress first sat.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.

A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

Genocide, massacre, and human slaughter; pillage, rape, and torture have been much more common than war and revolution. But historians do not dwell on such events. And even if they do, they very rarely attach numbers to them. They prefer the glamour of war, of diplomacy, of the clash of nations and personalities.

The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Analysts can choose the problems that they want to study whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.

Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.

The historian must walk a fine line between scientific detachment and humanistic engagement.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

This system demands that the historian shall describe without indignation the most brutal atrocities, speak without love about the highest virtues and with his glacial eye see in social life only the manifestation of irresistible laws due to which every phenomenon occurs exactly as it inevitably had to occur

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers

The main reason why historians have skated over the relationship of Victorian PMs with the press is that they haven't been looking for it. It takes a lecturer in media studies such as Paul Brighton to point out that media management was part of the job of a Victorian prime minister.

Historians of the future will examine how and why, the end disappearing behind the means, the Communists spirit ceased to be opposed to the Fascist spirit, and even to be differentiated from it.

In a hundred years the historian will understand me better.