65 Quotes About Historians

Historians will remember the first year of Microsoft Windows 10 for its willful vandalism of many computers through the release of a flawed operating system (OS) and mandatory flaky automatic updates.

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.

Probability is a light darted on the object, from the proofs, which for this reason are pertinently enough styled evidence. Plausibility is a native lustre issuing directly from the object. The former is the aim of the historian, the latter of the poet.

Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness.’ ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.

فالعهود الهانئة الهادئة قلما تحظى بإهتمام المؤرخ، تماماً كما أن العائلات السعيدة لا تثير حب إستطلاع الثرثارات من عجائز الحي

where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

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.