#historia

I began with the desire to speak with the dead. ↗

#education #historians #history #knowledge #shakespeare

A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that unanticipated developments often lead to unintended consequences. ↗

— Diane Ravitch

#history #death

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. ↗

— B.R. Ambedkar

#idealism #faith

The good historian, then, must be thus described: he must be fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty; one who, to use the words of the comic poet, calls a fig a fig, and a skiff a skiff, neither giving nor withholding from any, from favour or from enmity, not influenced by pity, by shame, or by remorse; a just judge, so far benevolent to all as never to give more than is due to any in his work; a stranger to all, of no country, bound only by his own laws, acknowledging no sovereign, never considering what this or that man may say of him, but relating faithfully everything as it happened. ↗

— Lucian of Samosata

#history #faith

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that. ↗

— Antony Beevor

#duty #historian #more #simply #than

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false. ↗

— Barry Unsworth

#evidence #false #fiction #find #historians

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians. ↗

— Chuck Close

#art #artists #certainly #does #find

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. ↗

— Edmond de Goncourt

#novelists #past #present #story #tell

Britain will be honoured by historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it. ↗

— Lord Harlech

#britain #disposed #empire #historians #honoured

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis. ↗