Quotes of Historian - somelinesforyou

“ I can see only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. ”

- Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher

“ An autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers. ”

- Barbara G. Harris

“ Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. ”

- Leo Tolstoy

“ Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects. ”

- Herodotus

“ Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian. ”

- Lee Simonson

“ A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. ”

- Mark Twain

“ God cannot alter the past, but historians can. ”

- Samuel Butler

“ Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. ”

- Samuel Johnson

“ Historian — an unsuccessful novelist. ”

- H. L. Mencken

“ Historian. A broad — gauge gossip. ”

- Ambrose Bierce

“ Historians are prophets with their face turned backward. ”

- Johann Friedrich von Schiller

“ Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. ”

- E. J. Hobsbawm

“ Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species. ”

- Konrad Lorenz

“ History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other. ”

- Philip Guedalla

“ Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic. ”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“ The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies. ”

- James A. Froude

“ The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward. ”

- Unknown

“ The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent. ”

- Peter Conrad

“ The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development. ”

- Aung San Suu Kyi

“ To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind. ”

- Harold Nicolson

“ HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. ”

- Ambrose Bierce

“ He is the purest figure in history. ”

- William E. Gladstone

“ History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. ”

- Edward Gibbon

“ However gradual the course of history, there must always be the day, even an hour and minute, when some significant action is performed for the first or last time. ”

- Peter Quennell

“ More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. ”

- Woody Allen

“ People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors. ”

- Edmund Burke

“ Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. ”

- Abraham Lincoln

“ History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we made today. ”

- Henry Ford

“ Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. ”

- H. G. Wells

“ The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. ”

- Eric Hoffer
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