1-History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
2-If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. ~Pearl Buck
3-History is philosophy teaching by examples. ~Thucydides, The History
of the Peloponnesian War
4-People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. ~James Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son
5-The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din
Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.
~John Greenleaf Whittier
6-Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the
hunters. ~African Proverb
7-The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from. ~John Still,
The Jungle Tide
8-All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been
agreed upon. ~Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin
9-Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know
anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree. ~Michael
Crichton, Timeline
10-We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think
it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory,
and when the Indians won it was a massacre. ~Dick Gregory
History is herstory, too. ~Author Unknown
A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.
~Thomas Babington Macaulay
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to
reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion
of former days. ~Winston Churchill
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps
and eternity for a background. ~Thomas Carlyle
History is a novel for which the people is the author. ~Alfred de Vigny,
Réflexions sur la Vérité dans l'Art
History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly
meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity. ~Dexter
Perkins
History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely,
Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his
incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage
some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil. ~Joseph
Heller, Good as Gold
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all:
the conscientious historian will correct these defects. ~Herodotus, The
History of Herodotus
History: gossip well told. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary
History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events
as verses. ~Charles Angoff
If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead
intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits.
That is history to me! ~George Macaulay Trevelyan
The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and
butter. ~Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon, The Story of Mankind
Historians are gossips who tease the dead. ~Voltaire, Scribbling Books
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden
shoes coming up. ~Voltaire
We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? ~Robert Penn Warren,
Segregation
History never looks like history when you are living through it. ~John W.
Gardner
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age. ~H.L. Mencken
God cannot alter the past, though historians can. ~Samuel Butler, "Prose Observations"
History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. ~Konrad
Adenauer
Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled
duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for
this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they
won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes,
is what they're supposed to be. ~P.J. O'Rourke
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
~Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion
History is a vast early warning system. ~Norman Cousins
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. ~H.L. Mencken
Historian: A broad-gauge gossip. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
History is a great dust heap. ~Thomas Carlyle, Obiter Dicta
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. ~Will and Ariel Durant,
Our Oriental Heritage
A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children
and other innocents. ~Richard Reeves
History is past politics, and politics present history. ~John Robert Seeley,
The Growth of British Policy
Bound as our lives are to the tyranny of time, it is through what we know of history
that we are delivered from our bonds and escape - into time. ~A.L. Rowse,
The Use of History
The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers
of truth turn if not to history? ~Katharine Anthony
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
~W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for
the train of the future to run over him. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up. ~Author Unknown
History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the
mind, yet drive man on with a blind force. ~Frederick Maurice Powicke,
History, Freedom & Religion
Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study
for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.
~W.H. Auden, A Certain World
More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.
~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders
of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
~Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary
Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are
dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos. ~Thomas A. Bailey
Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers. ~Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and
Hero Worship
People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery.
~Aristide Briand
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books. ~Thomas Carlyle,Life
of Frederick the Great
Sin writes histories, goodness is silent. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Table - Talk
[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several
thousand years by dogma against curiosity. ~Robert S. Lynd
History begins in novel and ends in essay. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay
[W]hen a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose
bourne he will never return a historian. ~Shailer Mathews, The Spiritual
Interpretation of History
It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
~Thomas Carlyle
[T]he Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past. ~Thomas Carlyle,Characteristics
History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are
brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. ~Ambrose
Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. ~Mary McCarthy, On
the Contrary
What is the fire in our belly but the eternal flame of a thousand ancestors.
~Robert Brault,
www.robertbrault.com
As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
History is merely gossip. ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
Some write a narrative of wars and feats,
Of heroes little known, and call the rant
A history.
~William Cowper, The Task, The Garden
The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the
weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history. ~Benedetto
Croce, History as the Story of Liberty
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked
them. ~Leo Tolstoy
The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.
~David Thelen
If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history,
the three of them together. ~Theodore White
Princes should have more to fear from historians than have ugly women from great
painters. ~Antonio Pérez, Aforismos
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events
throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.
~George Santayana, The Life of Reason
Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker
of horror or indignation. ~Conor Cruise O'Brien
History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.
~Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man
The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne,The
House of Seven Gables
Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces,
each grimacing in a different way. ~Richard Ellman
History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.
~Walter Rauschenbusch
History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs;
priviledging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities
or inconveniences thereof. ~Thomas Fuller
I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks,
must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man. ~Romain Gary
Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath,
or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else. ~Herbert
Butterfield, Christianity and History
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same
is true of man. ~Jean Genet
When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious. ~Anatole France,
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm
them. ~Guy Fregault, La guerre de la conquête
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?
~John Leonard
History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral, but
forced to enlist in every army. ~Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History
History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it
is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles
many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
~Jacques Barzun,Clio and the Doctors
History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought - two boys
pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson,The
Conduct of Life: Fate
All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and
we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another
that were trodden by the weary generations of men. ~John Alfred Spender,
The Comments of Bagshot
A boy who hears a lesson in history ended by the beauty of peace, and how Napoleon
brought ruin upon the world and that he should be forever cursed, will not long
have much confidence in his teacher. He wants to hear more about the fighting
and less about the peace negotiations. ~William Lee Howard, Peace,
Dolls and Pugnacity
[H]istory is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes
that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick.
~Max Nordau, The Interpretation of History
History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings.
It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past
and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished
and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs.
~Bill Nye,History of the United States
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the
inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal.
Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs,
but characters written in the dust? ~Washington Irving, The Sketch
Book: Westminster Abbey
For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously
add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument
to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species. ~Washington Irving,
History of New York
Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes. ~Jean Jaures
The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will
chew our meat for us. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated
Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.
~Franklin P. Jones
Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
~Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
The obscurest epoch is today. ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains
A mere compilation of facts presents only the skeleton of History; we do but
little for her if we cannot invest her with life, clothe her in the habiliments
of her day, and enable her to call forth the sympathies of succeeding generations.
~Hannah Farnham Lee, The Huguenots in France and America
It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his
life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the
human race is in quite a jam about truth. ~Rebecca West
For me there is no greater subject than history. How a man can study it
and not be forced to become a philosopher, I cannot tell. ~George E. Wilson
Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels
than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and
follow. ~Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers
What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties
and our rights, without appearing to teach them. ~Voltaire, Philosophical
Dictionary
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally
swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set
of facts. ~Bill Vaughan
Whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones,
Whose table earth, whose dice were human bones.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "The Age of Bronze"
Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the
story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the
reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat. ~Augustus William Hare
and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over
which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us.
It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint
and contrast to our fundamental failures. ~Robert Penn Warren
Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary. ~Lynn White, Jr.
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
~A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who
weren't there. ~George Santayana
I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history
in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is a tradition.
We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's
damn is the history we make today. ~Henry Ford
A lot of guys have had a lot of fun joking about Henry Ford because he admitted
one time that he didn't know history. He don't know it, but history will
know him. He has made more history than his critics ever read. ~Will
Rogers
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
~Jessamyn West
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
~Alexis de Tocqeville, 1856
Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels,
it may haply strike out his teeth. ~Walter Raleigh, History of the
World
History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among
which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times.
~Voltaire,L'Ingénu
History... is, indeed, little more than the register of the 'crimes, follies,
and misfortunes' of mankind. But what experience and history teach is
this - that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history,
or acted on principles deduced from it. ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
The Philosophy of History, "Introduction," 1807
History balances the frustration of "how far we have to go" with the satisfaction
of "how far we have come." It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings
and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.
~Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living. ~James
Robertson
The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared.
These gaps can be filled only by his imagination. ~Gaetano Salvemini,
Historian and Scientist
History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts;
it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen
closed cases. ~William Stubbs
Skepticism is history's bedfellow. ~Edgar Saltus
The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters
of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to
renew it. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at
Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
History does not unfold: it piles up. ~Robert M. Adams, Bad Mouth
The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is
sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.
~Vincent Starrett, Buried Caesars
History is a pageant and not a philosophy. ~Augustine Birrell, Obiter
Dicta: The Muse of History
History, like thermodynamics, won't let you out. ~Ira Haron
Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of
view of the turkey. ~Mason Cooley
History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology. ~Hippolyte
Taine
History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.
~Jules Romains, Men of Good Will
The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly
colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul. ~John
Quincy Adams
History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow. ~Francis Ponge
History: a collection of epitaphs. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft
Dictionary
Unfortunately, it is also true that the age's interests often color the past
with unhistoric hues. ~Wendell H. Stephenson
Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject
he may. ~Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation: Diogenes and
Plato
[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present. ~Fritz
Stern,The Varieties of History
[History is] a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss. ~W. Stull Holt
[W]hat mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry
dig up from the past time and name it History. ~Thomas Carlyle
No one can really know the life of his own day, let alone that of times
long past. Always the historian sees as in a mirror darkly, the reds and
the golds rendered drab by the shadows of time. ~Earl R. Beck, On Teaching
History in Colleges and Universities
When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren
rocks that rise out of it. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare,Guesses
at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot
integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a
history implicit and false. ~Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing
World
The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is
an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers,
out of the irreconcilable opinions of men. ~F. Smith Fussner, The Historical
Revolution
Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.
~Bruce Catton, Prefaces to History
Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors. ~Sébastien Roch
Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations
One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a
drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This
instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis
of civilization. ~John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones
History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point
of view to be useful to the modern traveler. ~Henry Glassie
A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be
false. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay
History, that excitable and unreliable old lady. ~Guy de Maupassant,
Sur l'Eau
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history. ~Pieter
Geyl,Debates With Historians
[I]t was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature
that repeats itself, not history. ~John Toland
[History] is fallible as every man is fallible. But it is likewise trustworthy,
as a man is trustworthy who has looked into himself and come to know how blended
are dust and fire in the innermost recesses of the human heart. ~Arthur
Bestor
There is nothing more dangerous than history used as a defense, or history used
for preaching; history used as a tool is no longer history. ~Marcel Trudel
We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances
in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and
we tend to lose the meaning of the play. ~Régis Debray, Revolution
in the Revolution?
History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it
infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect
upon it for themselves. ~George Macaulay Trevelyan
Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history
that is waiting to be made. ~John Terraine
History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves
with the property of others. ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains
but in their nerves and vitals. ~Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues
of Alfred North Whitehead
Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known
to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are
those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing. ~Willis Thornton,
Fable, Fact and History
And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still
continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of
all the myriads of spinners through space. ~George Macaulay Trevelyan,
An Autobiography
No modern idea has affected history more than the passion of nationalism.
~Charles R. Poinsatte, Understanding History Through the American Experience
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with
amnesia. ~David McCullough
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 Historian's Craft
The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been
kept alive. ~John Morley, Notes on Politics and History
It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes,
even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget
that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.
~Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Western World
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to
the wall. ~Jawaharlal Nehru
The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature;
and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little
of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something
is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are
neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.
~Thomas Babington Macaulay, Machiavelli
History is the story of events, with praise or blame. ~Cotton Mather
If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring.
Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest
truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints. ~Allen Nevins
A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints
made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended
sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these
particular journeys. ~Michael Oakeshott, On History
Historians are themselves products of history. ~Paul K. Conkin and Roland
N. Stromberg, Heritage and Challenge
History is politics projected into the past. ~M.N. Pokrovsky
The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front
has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy
and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal. ~José Ortega
y Gasset,Historical Reason
It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches
the bounds of mythology. ~Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes
It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book
of sermons. ~Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke
History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History
is on the side of what happened. ~Elias Canetti, The Human Province
In a certain sense all men are historians. ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays:
On History
It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major
into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history
is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence
by snubbing the dead. ~E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest
The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves. ~James
A. Garfield
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History is written by the winners. ~Alex Haley
[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust. ~Edith
Sitwell
History is the daughter of time. ~Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief
in the Sixteenth Century
History paints the human heart. ~Napoleon I
Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened
and those which do not matter. ~W.R. Inge, Assessments and Anticipations
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. ~Henry
James, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne
History is an argument without end. ~Pieter Geyl
This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery. ~Samuel
Johnson
History is a bath of blood. ~William James, Memories and Studies
History... is an aggregation of truths, half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths,
rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip, and official prevarications.
It is a canvas upon which thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed
their conceptions and interpretations of a day and an era. Some motifs
are grotesque and some are magnificent. ~Philip D. Jordan
We proceed out of history into history again. ~Sidney Alexander
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads
of the majority in the middle. ~Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
[H]istory gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions. ~Hajo
Holborn, History and the Humanities
There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without
an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.
~Philip Howard
History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every
age. ~Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History
[T]he historian and the detective have much in common. ~Mark M. Krug,History
and the Social Sciences
History is the synthesis of all social sciences turned towards the past.
~Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with
blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians
usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love,
raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The
story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians
are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river. ~Will Durant
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled
for understanding. ~Will and Ariel Durant, The Reformation
[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch. ~Lynn White, Jr.
History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted.
Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness.
It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates
old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium
of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter,
arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious. ~Paul Valéry, Regards sur
le Monde Actuel
The study of history is the playground of patriotism. ~George M. Wrong
History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance.
~R. Jackson Wilson
History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and
it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch
or two for a pattern. ~Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion
History is the propaganda of the victors. ~Ernst Toller
[Some historians hold that history] is just one damned thing after another.
~Arnold Toynbee
Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real
as the present and as uncertain as the future. ~George Macaulay Trevelyan,
Clio, A Muse
People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".
~Ken Burns
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets
and re-explains what has happened. ~Peter Berger
History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions. ~Ted
Koppel
The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity.
If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred
- different versions of what took place. ~David and Leigh Eddings
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.
Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples
of altruism? ~Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
[H]istorians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous.
~Robert Stinson
As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without
Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation. ~John Smith
The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they
have made on him. ~Heinrich von Sybel
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the
safest and the surest emancipation. ~John Acton
History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
~John Acton
History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human
spirit. ~Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique, 1864
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological
history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
~A.J.P. Taylor
Too many so-called historians are really 'hysterians'; their thinking is more
visceral than cerebral. When their duties as citizens clash with their
responsibilities as scholars, Clio frequently takes a back seat. ~Thomas
A. Bailey
History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to
have happened. ~Earnest Albert Hooten, The Twilight of Man
[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original
with which to match the copy does not exist. ~Jacques Barzun, Clio
and the Doctors
Without philosophy, history seems to me to be deaf and dumb. ~Ferdinand
Baur,Symbolik und Mythologic
The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We
must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their place
is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated
in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present. ~David Lowenthal,
The Past Is a Foreign Country
For the rubble of history, which is undigested and therefore goes on blindly,
does not lie so thickly on the ground as in our own consciousness. ~Herbert
Lüthy
Unlike poetry and music, the art of history is cumulative. ~John Clive,
Not By Fact Alone
In studying history we are finding out about ourselves, and in the last resort
the natural sciences and even mathematics have the same final end. ~Vivian
Hunter Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History
History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.
~Jacob Burckhardt
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight
to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
~Albert Camus,The Rebel
History is concerned primarily with human phenomena, not with natural; and history
is doubly human because, as an idea, it is man's creation, challenging him to
transcend the limits of information about himself and to discover what he is
by finding meaning in what he has done. In short, it is man's commentary
on man. ~John Barker, The Superhistorians
For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks
up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by
a tornado. ~Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval
forest which fell without being heard. ~Barbara Tuchman
Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise
and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols
for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals. ~John
Dewey, Characters and Events
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of
the living. ~William Carlos Williams
The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history. ~Miguel
de Unamuno, En Gredos
History is the discipline closest to life; and life is rarely free of contradictions.
~Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture
History is who we are and why we are the way we are. ~David McCullough
History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
~Henry Miller, Plexus
The historian amputates reality. ~Gaetano Salvemini, Historian and
Scientist
History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so
is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some
order upon it. ~Henry Steele Commanger, The Nature and the Study of
History
History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies. ~Frederick Maurice
Powicke, Three Lectures
History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. ~James Joyce,Ulysses
History is but the nail on which the picture hangs. ~Alexandre Dumas,
Catherine Howard
The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried,
bears contemplation. ~G.R. Elton, The Practice of History
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history,
only biography. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: History
History is the essence of innumerable biographies. ~Thomas Carlyle,
On History
History only exists, in the final analysis, for God. ~Albert Camus,
The Rebel
[History is] petrified imagination. ~Arthur Baer
It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together
with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to
the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment. ~Francis Bacon, Advancement
of Learning
[History is a] mixture of error and violence. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No less than the tourist, the writer of history profits from maps. ~Charles
F. Mullett
Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without
history. ~Carlton J.H. Hayes
To many of the modern generations, history, like God, is dead. ~Derek
Heather
[H]istory is the sextant of states which, tossed by wind and current, would
be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position. ~Allan Nevins,
The Gateway to History
No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.
~Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas
A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture.
And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate
with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life. ~Allen
Johnson, The Historian and Historical Evidence
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended
from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed
on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and
corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak
and degenerate race of beings. ~Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire
History attempts to provide society with an artificial collective memory.
~Mark M. Krug, History and the Social Sciences
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.
~Thomas Jefferson
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. ~Thomas Jefferson
History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make. ~Author Unknown
History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but
a lifeless mass. ~Frederic Harrison, The Meaning of History
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