Historiography Quotes

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

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

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.

All history is the history of thought.

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

Official history is believing the murderers at their word.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Most history books are about power.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

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.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Concepts antedate facts.