#historians

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

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened. ↗

— Kenneth Baker

#came #causes #economists #had #happened

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

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

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

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970. ↗

— Tom Hayden

#chapters #civil #civil rights #establishment #handle

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America. ↗

— James H. Breasted

#ancient #been #disclosed #displayed #east