Quotes about Historians

"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."
-Konrad Lorenz

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
-Leo Tolstoy

"The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past."
-Samuel Butler

"History is too serious to be left to historians."
-Ian Macleod

"We will leave that to historians."
-Halee Hamilton

"Mostly, we are amateur historians. We try to live like our ancestors or forefathers."
-Wade Reynolds

"As historians, our training and discipline is based on documentary evidence."
-David Dixon

"The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent."
-Peter Conrad

"Give the historians something to write about."
-Sextus Propertius

"It is not the historian's business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them . . . dispassionately, impartially and without ulterior motives."
-Lytton Strachey

"The historian must have some conceptions of how men who are not historians behave."
-Edward Morgan Forster