I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, `The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.` I know it`s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it`s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.
- Sacha Baron CohenBut in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
- Oliver StoneYou`re not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.
- Oliver StoneI am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I`m a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.
- Oliver StoneI`m a historian in my own mind.
- Quentin TarantinoI`m a historian, and that freaks me out.
- Mike TysonI`m not an historian and I`m not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who`s walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
- Penelope LivelyI`m not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it`s palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
- Penelope LivelyNo Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as `what a man does with his solitude.`
- C.S. LewisYou need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
- Ken Burns(on his role as Father Grandier in The Devils (1971)) You would think from the critics` hostility that Ken Russell had tried to pull off some obscene hoax. On the contrary, the film is, I think, an utterly serious attempt to understand the nature of religious and political persecution. It is not in any way exaggerated. If anything, the horrors perpetrated in Loudun in the 17th century were worse than Russell has chosen to show . . . the character of the priest was a marvelous one to act. Ken Russell`s brother-in-law is an historian and he helped me research Grandier`s life, with particular reference to his thesis in celibacy. The people of Loudun loved him. He walked among the plague victims and comforted them. I started to play him as a priest and realized that he was a politician.
- Oliver ReedI think the game was out of hand before that (home run). It doesn`t (mean a great deal) because I don`t have anything to compare it to. I`m not a baseball historian. I don`t go home and add it up. I`ll add it all up after I retire.
- Jeff KentIn the mysteries project we turn students into historian detectives and invite them to do the exciting work of history. Normally, we tell students what happened when we teach history, but in this project we ask them to tell us,
- John LutzNow, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to `95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it`s not written by an art historian.
- ChristoWhat is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.
- Lion FeuchtwangerBoth the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.
- Lion FeuchtwangerThe historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he`s nothing if he doesn`t make out a case.
- Howard NemerovYou`ve got to understand their reasoning. They think of this historian as one of their pocket-people, whom they feel they can count on.
- Steven SmithAny event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
- Adam HoffingerThe 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.
- Adam LinkenaugerReason is the historian, but passions are the actors.
- Al BrooksThe search for the truth for truth`s sake is the mark of the historian.
- Al HartkopfI can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What`s the same and what`s different?
- Alan ZemaitisA good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.
- Alex BeuzelinThe historian is a prophet looking backward.
- Alex GarwoodThe first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
- Alfred FrankensteinIf he is a Christian the historian must believe that God has always been active and has been pursuing His purpose of creating sons and not robots.
- Allen SinaiI didn`t realize the president was such an historian.
- Amal SalmanThe most secular, atheist historian on the planet would have to grant that the entire legal system of Western civilization pivots off those tablets.
- Amber BaconThe 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.
- Amy BegginEvery historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.
- Amy EstryThe first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
- Andreas HoistadThe historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
- Andrew Clay(For Liberty native and architecture historian Douglas Lewis, every Coast building has a story. The combination of French Creole and English architecture distinguishes the Coast from any other place on the nation`s coastline, said Lewis, author of the forthcoming) Buildings of Mississippi ... Buildings of the United States.
- Andy MurphyI checked my files and discovered that I had seen the letter there in 1976. As a historian, it makes you angry that these types of thefts are occurring.
- Aymee HernandezActors yearn for the perfect director, athletes for the perfect coach, priests for the perfect pope, presidents for the perfect historian. Writers hunger for the perfect reviewer.
- Barbara RaaschHistorian: an unsuccessful novelist.
- Bill LovejoyThe first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.
- Marcus Tullius CiceroThe great religious historian, Eusebius, ingenuously remarks that in his history he carefully omitted whatever tended to discredit the church, and that he piously magnified all that conduced to her glory
- Robert Green Ingersoll