65 Quotes About Historians

My tutors all said that the greatest of the wizards died many years ago and that their like would never be again seen in our lands.”“Historians can be a pessimistic lot. I have never met one that did not believe that the world’s best years had already passed.

I am not a writer. I am a historian for another world.

Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.

No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.

That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.

Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.

Historians are not by and large inclined to supernatural explanations, but they are addicted to a near equivalent - 'inevitability'.

There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.