#historians

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#conservatives #evolution #historians #history #progressive

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 believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject. ↗

— Ibrahim Babangida

#believe #events #facts #historians #historical

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

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#appear #come #dead #ends #historians

I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at. ↗

— Frederick Wiseman

#because #century #confuse #documentaries #everybody

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#history #change

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#alter #cannot #god #historians #past

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