“Many historians make it a principal part of their business to investigate and explain the unfamiliar beliefs we encounter in past societies. But what is the relationship between our provision of such explanations and our assessment of the truth of such beliefs? The question is obviously a highly intractable one, but no practising historian can hope to evade it, as many philosophers have recently and rightly pointed out.”

— Quentin Skinner

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

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Quentin Skinner 11

British historian 1940

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

“One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (pp. 90–91)
Context: One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart, yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than the conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance.

“If historians who are able to check the facts admit their allegiance, we will have to change some of our beliefs about the origins of Germanism. We have to add that this book is abundant with documents and that some explanations - to say the Christianization of the Goths and the Huns - are very well documented and deserve serious attention”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

quotations for him
Source: François Pique, Revue Germanique, Paris, 1936

“My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence."”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

Introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (1991).

“We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs…. We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

“Many Christians don't want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection. … Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, and by definition, miracles are the least probable of occurrences.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Jesus, Interrupted

Source: Jesus, Interrupted (2009), Ch. 5: 'Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? Finding the Historical Jesus'

“Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe.”

Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) English poet and writer

Letter to William Makepeace Thackeray (1831); quoted in The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyán (1947) by Alfred McKinley Terhune, p. 57.
Context: Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure.

“[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist… Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality http://books.google.com/books?id=OHz70fY8t2UC&lpg=PA12&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2012), p. 12.
Nations and nationalism since 1780 programme, myth, reality (1992)

“In the year 1884 I wrote a book under the title "What I Believe," in which I did in fact make a sincere statement of my beliefs. In affirming my belief in Christ's teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church's doctrine… Among the many points in which this doctrine falls short of the doctrine of Christ I pointed out as the principal one the absence of any commandment of non-resistance to evil by force. The perversion of Christ's teaching by the teaching of the Church is more clearly apparent in this than in any other point of difference.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Preface
The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)

“Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

Why I Wrote 'The Crucible in The New Yorker (21 October 1996) https://archive.is/20130630000741/www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020422fr_archive02
Context: Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

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