Chinua Achebe
Novelist, Poet
"There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."
Historian quotes
Historian
88 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Ronald Wright
Author
"Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
Stendhal
Novelist
"The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent."
Miguel de Cervantes
Writer
"The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were."
D. James Kennedy
Pastor
"That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image."
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Historian quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten."
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"Every historian discloses a new horizon."
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"I'm a historian, and that freaks me out."
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"From time to time historians need to be shocked."
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"History is the invention of historians."
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"A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards."
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"To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?"
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"Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed."
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"History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity."
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"David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."
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"A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand."
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"What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily."
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"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
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"What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?"
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"History never repeats itself, historians do."
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"Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that."
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"Historians are prophets with their face turned backward."
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"A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it."
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