#historia

George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with ↗

— Justin Spring

#gay #homosexual #kinsey #secret-historian #tattoo

Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me. ↗

— Robertson Davies

#fifth-business #historians #infantry #orders #survival

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#among #carries #changes #commonest #different

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#conservatives #evolution #historians #history #progressive

I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#been #feel #full-time #historian #i

Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#carry #certainly #could #debates #europe

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history. ↗

— Barney Frank

#american #american history #because #could #encouragement

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language. ↗

— Paul de Man

#agent #both #degree #his #historian

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case. ↗

— Howard Nemerov

#discern #facts #historian #make #nothing

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#century #cultural #david #find #historians