Famous quotes containing the words ancient and/or historians:
“Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.”
—Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)