#historian

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

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible. ↗

— Elizabeth Kostova

#dark #dracula #european #fiction #historian

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

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

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

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves. ↗

— Lion Feuchtwanger

#against #blind #both #determined #historian

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

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story. ↗

— Donald Kagan

#explaining #had #historians #history #own

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different? ↗

— Donald Kagan

#always #anybody #ask #because #different