Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who “built a world around Europe”, as historians “know”, according to Braudel. That is indeed the “knowledge” of the European historians who themselves “invented” history...

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable.”...

Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.

Leave history to historians.

In the history of the world, we have left our footprints by our unique stories.

Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History...

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians

I began with the desire to speak with the dead.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was...

Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above...

In your travel, learn the brief history of the place visited. History is rich knowledge.

[Of course, nobody is expecting original scholarship onstage. That isn’t why Doctor Atomic has attracted intense interest among historians, scientists, and opera fans.] The development of the first atomic bomb is the great tragic epic...

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that ‘other’ cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to...

History is rich knowledge, In your travel, learn the brief history of the place visited. .

Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are – honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.

As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further: for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which...

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception...

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...

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...

Herodotus says, “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.

I meant to spend the day writing, but instead I spent the afternoon cleaning out my belly button. Historians will thank me one day.

Painters–and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!

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...

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...