Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.
The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.
Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.
Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.
I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
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.