#historians

Historians still often see the end of the war as meaning nothing more for Germany than lost territories, lost participation in colonization, and lost assets for the state and individuals. They frequently overlook the most serious loss that Germany suffered. ↗

— Gustav Stresemann

#colonization #end #frequently #germany #historians

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

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

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians. ↗

— Horace Walpole

#circumstances #exalt #historians #how #improve

Historians will likely give Obama credit for steering the country away from the brink of economic collapse in 2009. ↗

— Ron Fournier

#brink #collapse #country #credit #economic

Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and the presumption of guessing at the inner thoughts of historical figures. Unfortunately, the result has largely been not to demythologize the past, but merely to dehumanize and depersonalize it. As Roger Mudd has pointed out, 'Too many of today's historians [and biographers] ... seem to have forgotten that the writing of history is a literary art. ↗

— Markham Shaw Pyle

#history #writing #art

I began with the desire to speak with the dead. ↗

— Stephen Greenblatt

#education #historians #history #knowledge #shakespeare

A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that unanticipated developments often lead to unintended consequences. ↗

— Diane Ravitch

#history #death

A historian ought to be exact, sincere and impartial; free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection; and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future. ↗

— B.R. Ambedkar

#idealism #faith

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