#historian

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. ↗

— Rafael Sabatini

#change

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5). ↗

— Lauro Martines

#context #historians #history #memory #moralists

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible. ↗

— Elizabeth Kostova

#dark #dracula #european #fiction #historian

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution. ↗

— Barbara Amiel

#actually #among #been #bolshevik #brought

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

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write. ↗

— Alexander Downer

#historians #knows #well #will #write

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time. ↗

— Ken Burns

#get #historian #need #only #subject

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity. ↗

— Lion Feuchtwanger

#development #facts #historian #humanity #record

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

#been #biographer #could #critic #failed

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