#historians

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

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

Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so. ↗

— Spencer Abraham

#american #american century #century #council #doubt

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

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does. ↗

— Antony Beevor

#does #feel #going #historians #history

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

— Alexander Downer

#historians #knows #well #will #write

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#examples #footnotes #generalize #historian #historians

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#alter #cannot #god #historians #past

No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers. ↗

— Heinrich Schliemann

#aim #am #completely #customary #disagree

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind. ↗

— Carl L. Becker

#historians #history #age