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[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
Eric Hobsbawm
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken
The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.
Marc Bloch
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
Marc Bloch
To Oliver Goldsmith, A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched none that he did not adorn.
Samuel Johnson
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Herodotus
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
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E. L. Doctorow
I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field.
Carroll Quigley
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Penelope Lively
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
Penelope Lively
I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.
Stephen Ambrose
[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
Yann Martel
In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.
Ravi Zacharias
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
Henry James
A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate.
Joshua Reynolds
A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.
Peter Medawar
Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.
Sarah Grimké
The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.
John Dos Passos
The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.
Georg Brandes
What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?
David Hume
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
Niall Ferguson
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