#historian

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

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them. ↗

— George W. Bush

#historians #history #i #like #now

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian. ↗

— Christo

#art #because #book #describe #each

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

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

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician. ↗

— James Harrington

#first #historian #man #may #must

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects. ↗

— Herodotus

#correct #defects #few #few things #happen

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education. ↗

— Stephen Ambrose

#education #historian #i #learned #lifetime

As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then. ↗

— Thomas Frank

#even #every #extremely #finally #good

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are. ↗

— Penelope Lively

#been #century #change #dictated #historian