#historians

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

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

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe. ↗

— Simone Weil

#civilized #destroy #enslave #europe #european

Britain will be honoured by historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it. ↗

— Lord Harlech

#britain #disposed #empire #historians #honoured

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

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#asked #deaf #deaf people #go #historians

Fortunately, historians are now beginning to recognise the historic role of Islam as a liberating force for peoples oppressed by the burdens of unjust social systems. ↗

— Aly Khan

#burdens #force #fortunately #historians #historic

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende. ↗

— Erich Auerbach

#difficult #forced #historians #history #make

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