Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.
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To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
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'The first public protest against cruelty to animals, per Toynbee, a historian, was in 55 BC by the Roman people, to save the life of an elephant.'
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The historian is a prophet looking backward.
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It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of
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It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be Presid...
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We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.
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Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.
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The history of the Victorian Age will never be written we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
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Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change --only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
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Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack.
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I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destiny of man.
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The historian is a prophet in reverse.
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Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.
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We have an enormous fixation on, what seems to me to be, the na�¯ve idea that truth resides in what somebody wrote sometime in the past. If it's not written down, it isn't true. And that's absurd. But it's the way historians are trained: you have to have a source, and if you don't have something you can cite from an original source, in the original language, then you're not a really good historian, you're are not scientific, you're not true .
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The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.
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The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
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Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
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The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
History
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The poet, the dramatist, the novelist are free to exercise their imagination as widely as they choose. But the historian may not be allowed so...
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The historian must have some conceptions of how men who are not historians behave.
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A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.
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The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
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The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
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Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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