Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.
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Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
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Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing song.
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Anybody who would like to travel as an archaeologist of mores and observe men instead of rocks could find an image of the century of Louis XV in some village in Provence, that of Louis XIV in Poitou, that of even more remote times in the far reaches of Brittany. Most of these cities have fallen from some splendor that historians, more preoccupied with dates than customs, no longer speak of, but whose memory lives on, such as in Brittany, where the national character scarcely accepts the forgetting of what this country is fundamentally about. . . All of these cities have their primitive character.
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Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
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Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
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All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.
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For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
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We have an enormous fixation on, what seems to me to be, the na�¯ve idea that truth resides in what somebody wrote sometime in the past. If it's not written down, it isn't true. And that's absurd. But it's the way historians are trained: you have to have a source, and if you don't have something you can cite from an original source, in the original language, then you're not a really good historian, you're are not scientific, you're not true .
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I pray that when historians write the story of this time, of our lives, that it may be recorded that this president tried—tried to lead his ...
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Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
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The historian must have some conceptions of how men who are not historians behave.
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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.
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History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.
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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.
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History repeats itself historians repeat each other.
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In choosing a juror, we look for someone who has established credentials, someone who has established themselves as artists, (art) dealers or historians.
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In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
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I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man he fornicated and read the papers.
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Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
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Our American past always speaks to us with two voices the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him Citizens ask, What do they mean to us Historians are trained to seek the original meaning all of us want to know the present meaning.
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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.
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History is the lies historians agree upon
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God cannot alter the past, but historians can.
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Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.
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Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians.
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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
History
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The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.
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