History
- No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
-- Henry Brooks Adams
- The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
-- Anon.
- History belongs to the winner.
-- Anon.
- History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there.
-- Anon.
- We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.
-- Anon.
- Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
-- George W. Ball
- More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.
-- John Barth
- Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
-- Matsuo Basho
- The lessons of history? There are four: The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power; the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; when it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
-- Charles A. Beard
- History moves in contradictory waves, not in straight lines.
-- Louis Beck and Nikki Keddie
- The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
-- Max Beerbohm
- History: An account, mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- Mythology: the body of a primitive people's beliefs, concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deitits and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- History is a simple piece of paper covered with print. The main thing is still to make history, not to write it.
-- Otto von Bismark
- What is history but a fable agreed upon?
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
- It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
-- Samuel Butler
- History is the devil's scripture.
-- Lord Byron
- History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
-- Thomas Carlyle
- History is a confused heap of facts.
-- Lord Chesterfield
- The causes of events are ever more interresting than the events themselves.
-- Cicero
- Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.
-- Mary Coleridge
- History is a vast early warning system
-- Norman Cousins
- History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
-- Clarence Darrow
- History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.
-- Dorothy Salisbury Davis
- When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
-- Eugene V. Debs
- History is philosophy learned from examples.
-- Dionysius of Halicarnassus
- Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
-- Will Durant
- One of the lessons of history is that 'nothing' is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
-- Will Durant
- History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban
- History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.
-- Paul Eldridge
- All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.
-- Gretel Ehrlich
- Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
-- Gustav Flaubert
- History is more or less bunk.
-- Henry Ford
- History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
-- Anatole France
- History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.
-- John W. Gardner
- History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
-- Edward Gibbon
- Just as philosophy is the study of other people's misconceptions, so history is the study of other people's mistakes.
-- Phillip Guedalla
- History repeats itself; historians repeat each other.
-- Phillip Guedala
- War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
-- Thomas Hardy
- Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
-- Herodotus
- We will hereafter believe less history than ever, now that we have seen how it is made.
-- Don Herold
- The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of thr majority in the middle.
-- Eric Hoffer
- Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.
-- Philip Howard
- That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.
-- Aldous Huxley
- The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
-- Randall Jarrell
- There is no wisdom equal to that which comes after the event.
-- Geraldine Jewsbury
- We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world -- or the last.
-- John F. Kennedy
- History knows no resting place and no plateaus.
-- Henry Kissinger
- Perhaps in time the so-called dark ages will be thought of as including our own.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
-- Abraham Lincoln
- Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
-- Abraham Lincoln
- All history, of course, is the history of wars.
-- Penelope Lively
- The history of the world is the record of a man in quest for his daily bread and butter.
-- Hendrick Willem van Loon
- Throughout history females have picked providers. males have picked anything.
-- Margaret Mead
- The men who make history have not time to write it.
-- Metternich
- Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.
-- Henry de Montherlant
- The historian sees backward. In the end he also believes backward.
-- Frederich Wilhelm Nietzche
- Men after death are understood worse than men of the present, but heard better.
-- Frederich Wilhelm Nietzche
- History -- its what those bitter old men write.
-- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.
-- George Orwell
- Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid
- History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.
-- Nancy Pickard
- Give the historians something to write about.
-- Propertius
- The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been "great changes."
-- Marcel Proust
- Don't brood on what's past, but never forget it either.
-- Thomas H. Raddall
- A land without ruins is a land without memories--a land without memories is a land without history.
-- Abram Joseph Ryan
- The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.
-- Saki
- Every historian discloses a new horizon.
-- George Sand
- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana
- The world's history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.
-- Friedrich von Schiller
- The man who sees two or three generations is like someone who sits in a conjurer's booth at a fair and sees the tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
-- Arnold Schopenhauer
- History is past politics; and politics present history.
-- John Seeley
- Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
-- Lee Simonson
- I have no history but the length of my bones.
-- Robin Skelton
- History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
-- Stephen Spender
- The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
-- Stendhal
- History as a discipline can be characterized as having a collective forgetfulness about women.
-- Clarice Stasz Stoll
- The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
-- Jonathan Swift
- How many pens are broken, how many ink bottles consumed, to write about things that have never happened.
-- The Talmud
- History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
-- A.J.P. Taylor
- The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.
-- Richard H. Tawney
- The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.
-- Margaret Thatcher
- The function of posterity is to look after itself.
-- Dylan Thomas
- Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
-- Leo Tolstoy
- History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.
-- Mark Twain
- History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.
-- Voltaire
- History is just a portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.
-- Voltaire
- Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H. G. Wells
- To give an accurate description of what never happened is the proper occupation of the historian.
-- Orson Wells
- There is no life that does not contribute to history.
-- Dorothy West
- It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
-- Rebecca West
- To give an accurate description of what never happened is the proper occupation of the historian.
-- Oscar Wilde
- History started badly and has been getting steadily worse.
-- Geoffrey Willans / Ronald Searle
- What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
-- Virginia Woolf
- Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.
-- Ronald Wright
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