#historian

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. ↗

— Eric Hobsbawm

#contradictions #historians #justifies #makes #nation

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period. ↗

— Howard Hodgkin

#historian #historical #i #overview #period

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

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

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

Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#carry #certainly #could #debates #europe

The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men. ↗

— John Aubrey

#historians #lord #men #oxford #patron

The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due. ↗

— Buffalo Bill

#bull #day #due #fighting #give

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity. ↗

— Lion Feuchtwanger

#development #facts #historian #humanity #record