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

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.
Samuel E. Morison

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
Ferdinand de Saussure

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.
John Hope Franklin

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.
James Harrington

Now, 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.
Christo

Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.
Lee Hazlewood

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.
Antoine Rivarol

So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
A. B. Yehoshua

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
James Anthony Froude

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Stendhal

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.
Marc Bloch

The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.
Buffalo Bill

The historian is a prophet looking backward.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The 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 Nemerov

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
Marc Bloch

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.
E. M. Forster

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Thomas Kuhn

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