#historian

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

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies. ↗

— Marc Bloch

#fairy #fairy tale #flesh #giant #good

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines. ↗

— Marc Bloch

#definition #examines #facts #historian #incapable

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 was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda. ↗

— John Hope Franklin

#black #historian #necessary #personal

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#among #carries #changes #commonest #different

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding. ↗

— Albion W. Small

#become #facts #finding #forgotten #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