#historian

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry. ↗

— Dougray Scott

#dry #film #go #going #historians

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

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. ↗

— Eric Hobsbawm

#contradictions #historians #justifies #makes #nation

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period. ↗

— Howard Hodgkin

#historian #historical #i #overview #period

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

What comes to your mind when you think of the word Transylvania, if you ponder it at all? What comes to my mind are mountains of savage beauty, ancient castles, werewolves, and witches - a land of magical obscurity. How, in short, am I to believe I will still be in Europe, on entering such a realm? I shall let you know if it's Europe or fairyland, when I get there. First, Snagov - I set out tomorrow. ↗

— Elizabeth Kostova

#dracula #historian #transylvania #beauty

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

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#among #argue #critics #disagree #disagreements

If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective. ↗

— David Herbert Donald

#detective #historian #like #task #think

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

— Edmond de Goncourt

#novelists #past #present #story #tell