Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian. - Lee Simonson
The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers. - G. M. Trevelyan
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. - Oscar Wilde
The future historian will rank as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century.{Stanton's opinion of the great Robert Ingersoll} Elizabeth Cady Stanton - him
I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction. - Sara Sheridan
According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting. - Barbara Ehrenreich
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past. - Ambrose Bierce
The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. - E. H. Carr
A historian cannot pick and choose his facts; he must deal with all the evidence. - Barbara W. Tuchman
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. - Lytton Strachey
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. - Mark Twain
Many in America, as one social historian wrote, 'believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady French counts, and arrayed their poodle dogs in diamond tiaras.'... - Greg King
The historian records, but the novelist creates. - E.M. Forster
The scientist seeks laws; the historian, causes; the artist, freedom. - Marty Rubin
I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis - Antony Beevor
HISTORIAN, n. A broad-gauge gossip. - Ambrose Bierce
Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects. - Herodotus
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." -Professor Charles Homer Haskins - Jill Lepore
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.' - C. S. Lewis
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent. - Stendhal
Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered. - Ernst Jünger