Quotes on Historian

In a certain sense all men are historians.

America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora's box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

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.

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.