History Quotes

A million thanks to Steve for sharing some of his fantastic collection with me!

History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.  ~Pearl Buck

History is philosophy teaching by examples.  ~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.  ~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the dinOf its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.~John Greenleaf Whittier

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.  ~African Proverb

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.  ~John Still, The Jungle Tide

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.  ~Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin

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

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

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards. ~Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn

If you think you have it tough, read history books. ~Bill Maher

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 rantA 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

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them:  this is one summary of history.  ~Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History

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 treadsinto 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

History is man's best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

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

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as

often as they do.  ~Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History

  

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

'You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is'. - William Faulkner

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was - Leopold von Ranke

'Writing intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.' - William Hesseltine

'Writing history is a perpetual exercise in judgment'. - Cushing Strout

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever - Anonymous

'Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written'. - C. V. Wedgwood

'Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history'. - C. V. Wedgwood

'With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present'. - Kenneth Stampp

'Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.' - Machiavelli

'Whoever neglects learning in his youth loses the Past, and is dead to the Future.' - Euripides (480 - 406 BC), Greek playwright

'Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth'. - Cicero

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past - George Orwell

'While the mediocre European is obsessed with history, the mediocre American is ignorant of it'. - Anonymous

'When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness'. - Alexis de Tocqueville

When a man of true genius appears in the world, you may know him by the infallible sign, that all the dunces are in conspiracy against him (Jonathan Swift)

What is past is prologue - William Shakespeare

'What is all knowledge except recorded experience, and a product of history?' - Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881), Scottish historian

What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it - Hegel

'What else can history teach us? Only the vanity of believing we can impose our theories on history. Any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual'. - Jacques Ellul

'What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization'. - E. H. Carr

'We study history in order to intervene in the course of history - Adolf von Harnack

'We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.' - F.W. Maitland

'We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.' - Jose Ortega y Gassat (1882 - 1955), Spanish philosopher

'We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.' - Hegel (1770-1831) German philosopher

'We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.' - Reinhold Niebuhr

We get our ethics from our history and judge our history by our ethics (Ernst Troeltsch)

'We cannot escape history and neither can we escape a desire to understand it.' - Anonymous

'We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past'. - C. K. Chesterton

'We are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last 24 hours; we are not the best informed as to the events of the last 60 centuries.' - Will Durant, modern American thinker

Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. (African Proverb)

Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny - Alex Haley

'Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.' - Thomas Carlyle

'Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present'. - Paul Fussell

'Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar'. - Jefferson Davis

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, ... and possibly a tragic one - Hermann Hesse

'To look back upon history is inevitably to distort it'. - Norman Pearson

'To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity'. - Roy P. Basler

To each eye the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many…and lead to essentially different conclusions - Jacob Burckhardt

'To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history'. - Lord Acton

'To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings'. - Lord Bolingbroke

'To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child'. - paraphrase from an observation by Cicero

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it - Santayana

'This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds'. - Tacitus

There will always be a connection between the way in which men contemplate the past and the way in which they contemplate the present. (Thomas Buckle)

'There is properly no history, only biography'. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity. - Robertson Davies

'There is no history, only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility'. - Voltaire

'There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life'. - Karl Popper

'There is history in all men's lives.' - William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), British playwright

'The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation'. - John Hope Franklin

'The world is too dangerous to live in - not because of the people who do evil but because of the people who sit and let it happen'. - Albert Einstein

'The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery'. - Edward Gibbon

'The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.' - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) German Nazi leader

'The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.' - Mark Twain (1897)

'The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is'. - R. G. Collingwood

The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies…it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future - Carl Becker

'The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history'. - A.M. Schlesinger, Jr.

'The things that we know about the past may be divided into those which probably never happened, or those which do not much matter. Dean Inge

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves (Herbert Butterfield )

'The supreme purpose of history is a better world'. - Herbert Hoover

'The study of History is the beginning of wisdom.' - Jean Bodin (1530 - 1596), French economist

The study of history is a personal matter, in which the activity is generally more valuable than the result. (V. H. Galbraith)

'The past is never dead; it's not even past'. - Gavin Stevens (William Faulkner)

'The past is always a rebuke to the present'. - Robert Penn Warren

'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.' - L. P. Hartley, (1895 - 1972), English novelist

'The past in the hands of historians is not what it was'. - Lynn White, Jr.

'The past has always been the handmaid of authority'. - J.H. Plumb

'The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes'. - Mark Twain

'The past does not influence me; I influence it'. - Willem De Kooning

'The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease'. - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

'The only true knowledge of things is the knowledge of their causes'. - Archbishop Leighton

'The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know'. - Harry S Truman

'The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable'. - Oscar Wilde

'The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it'. - Oscar Wilde

'The more I read, the more I meditate; and the more I acquire the more certain I am that I know nothing.' - Voltaire (1694-1778) French philosopher and historian

'The moralist must praise heroism and condemn cruelty; but the moralist does not explain events'. - Georges Lefebvre

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. -George Bernard Shaw

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all (Oscar Wilde)

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. (William Hazlitt)

'The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world'. - Robert Penn Warren

'The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind'. - R. G. Collingwood

The history of the world is the history of the privileged few (Henry Miller)

'The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom'. - Hegel

'The history of states and nations has provided some income for historiographers and book dealers, but I know no other purpose it may have served.' - Borne

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles - Karl Marx

The historians are the guardians of tradition, the priests of the cult of nationality, the prophets of social reform, the exponents and upholders of national virtue and glory (Philip Bagby)

'The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material'. - C. V. Wedgwood

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts (Henry Adams)

'The historian must have…some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead'. - E.M. Forester

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact - Yosef Yerushalmi

'The historian amputates reality'. - Gaetano Salvemini

The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it - Milan Kundera

The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present - E. H. Carr

The first lesson of history is the good of evil - Ralph Waldo Emerson

'The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.' - Leo XIII

'The doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense'. - Crane Brinton

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. (G. K. Chesterton)

'The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of scepticism with faith'. - Goethe

'The course of History reflects a continual contest between limited, orderly processes of development and historical accident'. - H. Cord Meyer

'The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living'. - Karl Marx

'The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies'. - James Bryce

'The certainty of history seems to be in direct inverse ratio to what we know about it'. - Anonymous

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves - Cicero

'The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist'. - Sir Isaiah Berlin

The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things. (James Joll)

'That which is past and gone is irrevocable. Wise men have enough to do with the present and things to come'. - Francis Bacon

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)

'That generations of historians have resorted to what might be called 'proof by haphazard quotation' does not make the procedure valid or reliable; it only makes it traditional'. - Lee Benson

Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft - Winston Churchill

'Scepticism is history's bedfellow'. - Edgar Saltus

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public...then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves - M. Trevelyan

'Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order, pattern and possibly purpose'. - G. R. Elton

'Since God himself cannot change the past, he is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians'. - Attributed to Samuel Butler

'Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it'. - John Lewis Gaddis

'Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history'. - Albert Camus

'Problems cannot all be solved, for, as they are solved, new aspects are continually revealed: the historian opens the way, he does not close it'. - Sir Maurice Powicke

'Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics'. - Sir John Seeley

'Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.' - W. H. Auden (1907-1973) British poet

Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately. (F. M. Powicke)

'Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher theory than . history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular'. - Aristotle

Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducible from it - G.W.F. Hegel

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.- Soren Kierkegaard

'People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.' - James Baldwin

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this - Gustave Flaubert

Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it - Nietzsche

Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past - Sigmund Freud

'One must overcome history by dogma'. - Cardinal Manning

'One ceases to be lonely only in recollection; perhaps that is why people read history'. - John Andrew Rice

'Once historians wrote to instruct men in right examples and warn ' against evil ones. Now wiser in their generation they write to instruct other historians in true methodology and to warn against false ones.' - Unsigned article in the Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 1966

'Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History'. - A.S. Byatt

'Nothing is easier to teach than historical method, but, when learned, it has little use'. - Henry Adams

'Nothing falsifies history more than logic'. - Guizot

'Nothing endures but change'. - Heraclitus

'Nothing capable of being memorized is history'. - R. G. Collingwood

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child - Cicero

'Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence'. - Goethe

'No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error'. - W. C. Williams

'No historian should be trusted implicitly'. - G. Kitson Clark

'Myth, memory, history-these are three alternative ways to capture and account for an elusive past, each with its own persuasive claim'. - Warren I. Susman

'My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water'. - Henry Adams

'My country has no history, only a past'. - New Brunswick poet Alden Nowlan

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations. (John Barth)

'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past'. - Karl Marx

'Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature'. - David Hume

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Denis Diderot

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been (William Hazlitt)

'Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.' - W.H. Auden (1907 - 1973), British poet

'Man in a word has no nature; what he has. ..is history'. - Jose Ortega y Gasset

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment. (Arthur Schlesinger Jr)

'Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward'. - Søren Kierkegaard

'Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple'. - David Shannon

'Let the science and research of the historian find the fact and let his imagination and art make clear its significance'. - George Trevelyan

Legend - a lie that has attained the dignity of age - H. L. Mencken

'Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.' - Victorian saying

'Knowledge Qf history frees us to be contemporary'. - Lynn Write, Jr.

'Journalism is merely history's first draft.' - Geoffrey C. Ward

'It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.' - Felix Okoye

'It takes three facts to make a truth'. - Eugene Manlove Rhodes

'It takes a great deal of History to produce a little literature.' - Henry James (1879) Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

'It should be known that history is a discipline that has a great number of approaches'. - Ibn Khalduin of Tunis

'It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future'. - Maitland

'It is the essence of the poor that they do not appear in history'. - Anonymous

'It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also'. - C. G. Jung

'It is not man's evolution but his attainment that is the greatest lesson of the past and the highest theme of history.' - George Macaulay Trevelyan

'It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.' - Charles Pierre Peguy (1873-1914) French writer

'It is clear that history differs from the other disciplines in having an approach and not an area of its own'. - Leonard Krieger

It is a reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow men. (J. R. Green)

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole. (M. I. Finley)

'Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics'. - Morris R. Cohen

In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey

'In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all'. - Herbert Butterfield

'In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined'. - Leopold von Ranke

'In mass societies, myth takes the place of history'. - William Bosenbrook

'In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth'. - James Harvey Robinson

'In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind'. - Edmund Burke

'In history there are no real beginnings'. - Warren Sylvester Smith

In history one is absolutely sickened, not by the original crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishment that the good have inflicted (Oscar Wilde)

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself - Tolstoy

'In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial'. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality'. - Pieter Geyl

'If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development'. - Aristotle

If you do not like the past, change it - William L. Burton

'If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation'. - Lord Acton

'If people could learn history, what lessons it might teach us!' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), British poet

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Isaac Newton

'If History teaches any lesson at all, it is that there are no historical lessons'. - Lucien Febvre

'If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.' - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) Irish playwright

'If history is a collection of events which come to life for us because of what some actors did, some recorders recorded, and some previewers decided to retell, a clinician attempting to interpret an historical event must first of all get the facts straight'. - Erik Erikson

'If a modern historian were to show his works to the Venerable Bede, the man might well say, well and good, but I want to know how it was that God ordained the conversion of the British Isles'. - Charles W. Cole

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written - Samuel Johnson

'I, indeed, following the true law of history, have never set down any fact that I have not learned from trustworthy speakers or writers'. - William of Malmesbury

'I wonder why we hate the past so'. - W.D. Howells to Mark Twain' - It's so damned humiliating'. - Twain's reply

'I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about Europe'. - Paul Klee

'I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time'. - Paul Valery

'I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.' - Mark Twain

'I often think it odd that it [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention'. - Catherine Morland

'I don't believe the truth will ever be known, and I have a great contempt for history'. - Gen. George Meade

'I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out'. - C. G. Jung

'I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past'. - Augustine Birrell

'I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught'. - Sir Winston Churchill

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe (H. G. Wells)

'Honest history is the weapon of freedom'. - A.M. Schlesinger, Jr.

History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools - Ambrose Bierce

'History: a collection of epitaphs'. - Elbert Hubbard

'History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions'. - Lord Acton

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . .The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - Jane Austen

'History, in brief, is an analysis of the past in order that we may understand the present and guide our conduct into the future'. - Sidney E. Mead

'History, in a democratic age, tends to become a series of popular apologies, and is inclined to assume that the people can do no wrong'. - A. F. Pollard

'History, facts and truth are all Divine Products, and must prevail'. - Charles A. Briggs

'History, by appraising. ..[the students] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future'. - Thomas Jefferson

'History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form'. - Johan Huizinga

'History would be an impossible area of human reflection if there were no recurrent attributes of human nature.' - Willson H. Coates

'History without politics descends to mere Literature'. - Sir John Robert Seely

'History within itself cannot be transcended. ... In history itself there are only relative victories'. - Ernst Troeltsch

'History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea'. - Henry Adams

'History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.' - Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) British politican

'History will absolve me'. - Fidel Castro

'History to be above evasion must stand on documents not on opinion'. - Lord Acton

'History thus becomes largely a study of character. Insight into temperament is hardly less important than the probing of 'original materials.' - Charles F. Adams, Jr.

'History teaches us tolerance for human shortcomings and imperfections.' - Lewis F. Powel, American writer

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives - Abba Eban

'History teaches everything, even the future'. - Alphonse de Lamartine

History shows us how many ways one subject can be viewed. We learn not to be too contemptuous of mistakes made by historical figures who were trying to accomplish something - John Eisenhower

'History should rescue past lost causes from oblivion'. - Anonymous

'History repeats itself because nobody listens.' - Laurence Peter, Professor of Education at the University of California

'History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes'. - Randolph S. Bourne

'History proves nothing because it contains everything'. - Emil Cioran

History ought to be useful to life. The task of history is not in judging the past but to judge the present. It can be a tool for liberation of thought and a freeing of possibilities - Anon.

'History never repeats itself, man always does.' - Voltaire (1694-1778) French philosopher and historian

'History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.' - John Betjeman (1952)

'History must be written of, by and for the survivors'. - Anonymous

'History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life'. - Reinhold Niebuhr

'History makes some amends for the shortness of human life.' - Philip Skelton, American writer

History knows no resting places and no plateaus - Henry Kissinger

'History itself touches only a small part of a nation's life. Most of the activities and sufferings of the people ... have been and will remain without written record'. - E. L. Wood word

'History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are'. - Ken Burns

'History is, indeed, an argument without end'. - A.M. Schlesinger, Jr.

'History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical'. - Marc Bloch

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity - Cicero

History is the torch that is meant to illuminate the past to guard us against the repetition of our mistakes of other days. We cannot join in the rewriting of history to make it conform to our comfort and convenience - Claude Bowers

History is the sextant and compass of states, which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position. (Alan Nevins)

'History is the self-consciousness of humanity'. - Droyson

'History is the science of people.' - Jose Ortega y Gassat (1882 - 1955), Spanish philosopher

'History is the record of encounters between character and circumstance'. - Donald Creighton

'History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. The history of man's ideas is nothing more than the chronicle of human error'. - Voltaire

'History is the projection of ideology into the past'. - quoted from an unnamed source by John Keegan

'History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art'. - Johann Gustav Droysen

'History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought'. - Etienne Gilson

'History is the new poetry'. - Thomas Carlyle

'History is the narrative of great actions with praise or blame.' - Quoted by Cotton Mather

''History' is the name we as human beings give to the horizon of consciousness within which we live'. - Harvey Cox

'History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything'. - Paul Valery

'History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated'. - Henry Adams

'History is the memory of things said and done'. - Carl L. Becker

'History is the invention of historians'. - Attributed to Napoleon

'History is the great propagator of doubt'. - A.J.P. Taylor

'History is the essence of innumerable biographies'. - Thomas Carlyle

'History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration'. - Norman O. Brown

'History is the distillation of rumour'. - Thomas Carlyle

'History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.' - David Hume (1711 - 1776), British philosopher

History is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience…examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, rotten things to avoid - Livy

History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality - Oswald Spengler

'History is still in large measure poetry to me'. - Jakob Burckhardt

'History is something that never happened told by someone who wasn't there.' - Gomez de la Serna

'History is simply a piece of paper covered with print: the main thing is to make history, not to write it.' - Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) Prussian unifier of Germany

'History is reading all that you can as fast as you can and - remembering as much as you can'. - Lynn Berleffi Darr

History is Philosophy teaching by examples - Thucydides

'History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning. Lord Bolingbroke

'History is past politics, and politics is present history.' - E.A. Freeman (1823 - 1892), British historian

'History is only a value of relation'. - Henry Adams

'History is only a catalogue of the forgotten'. - Henry Adams

'History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such'. - Henry L. Stimson

'History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose'. - J. H. Plumb

'History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies'. - Fustel de Coulanges

'History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches'. - Lord Acton

'History is not narration' as Thierry thought, nor analysis as Guizot thought, it is resurrection'. - Michelet

'History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that'. - Robert Penn Warren

'History is not history unless it is the truth'. - Abraham Lincoln

History is not a succession of events, it is the links between them. (E. Evans)

'History is not a science; it is a method'. - Charles Seignobos

'History is not a catalogue but…a convincing version of events'. - A.J.P. Taylor

'History is no more than memories refreshed'. - Peter C. Newman

'History is neither written nor made without love or hate'. - Theodor Mommsen

History is more or less bunk - Henry Ford

'History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history'. - Louis Gottschalk

'History is interim reports issued periodically'. - Anonymous

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth - Cicero

'History is full of delightful reversals, where the opposite of what one predicts comes true'. - Edmund Carpenter

History is for human self-knowledge…Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is - R. G. Collingwood

'History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up'. - Voltaire

History is but a pack of tricks we play on the dead. (Voltaire)

History is as much an art as a science. (Ernest Renan)

'History is and should be a science'. - Fustel de Coulanges

'History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor'. - Carl Becker

'History is an endless repetition of the wrong way to live.' - Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) British novelist

'History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten'. - George Santayana

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing - Jeannette Winterson

'History is a science, no more and no less'. - J. B. Bury

'History is a reconstruction of life in its wholeness, not of the superficial aspects, but of the deeper, inner organic processes'. - Michelet

History is a people's memory, and without memory man is demoted to the lower animals - Malcolm X

'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken'. - Stephen Daedalus (James Joyce)

'History is a myth that men agree to believe'. - Napoleon

'History is a means of access to ourselves'. - Lynn White, Jr.

''History' is a Greek word which means, literally, just 'investigation.' - Arnold Toynbee

'History is a great dust heap'. - Thomas Carlyle

'History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same'. - A. L. Rowse

History is a better guide than good intentions - Jeane Kirkpatrick

'History in our kind of society is not a luxury but a necessity'. - Patrick Hazard

History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors (Christopher Hill)

'History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.' - O. W. Holmes, Jr.

'History has thrust something upon me from which I cannot turn away'. - Martin Luther King Jr.

'History has now been for the first time systematically considered, and has been found, like other phenomena, subject to invariable laws.' - August Comte

'History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole'. - Alfred Kazin

'History has a way of censoring contemporary values'. - Anonymous

'History furnishes to politics all the arguments that it needs, for the chosen cause'. - Romain Rolland

History free of all values cannot be written. Indeed, it is a concept almost impossible to understand, for men will scarcely take the trouble to inquire laboriously into something which they set no value upon. (W. H. B. Court)

History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her pursuing their purposes - Karl Marx

'History does not usually make real sense until long afterward'. - Bruce Catton

'History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.' - Max Beerbohm

History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history - Kahlil Gibran

'History does not belong to us; we belong to it'. - Hans-Georg Gadamer

'History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite'. - Edmund Burke

'History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions'. - Voltaire

'History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future'. - Robert Penn Warren

'History can be well written only in a free country.' - Voltaire (1737)

'History belongs above all to the man…who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries'. - Friedrich Nietzsche

'History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations'. - James Harvey Robinson

History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind - Edward Gibbon

'Histories make men wise.' - Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626), English statesman

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living constantly remake - Robert Warren

'Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection'. - William Least Heat Moon

'Historians, it is said, fall into one of three categories: Those who lie'. - Those who are mistaken'. - Those who do not know'. - Anonymous

'Historians have a responsibility to make some sense of the past and not just to repeat it.' - Michael Howard (1981) British politician

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. - Leo Tolstoy

'Historian, discover the truth and publish it'. - Inscription over the grave of Oklahoma historian Angie Debo.

'Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.' - Billy Wilder (1906) Austrian-born US film director. (Attrib)

'He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia! - Gottfried Benn

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth - Goethe

'Happy people have no history'. - Leo Tolstoy

'Half the job in teaching history is in getting the students interested in the questions the Professor deems important'. - Sidney E. Mead

'God cannot change the past, but historians can.' - Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902), from Erewhon Revisited (1902)

'For wisdom is the great end of History. It is designed to supply the want of experience'. - Hugh Blair

'For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual'. - A.M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing - Joseph Conrad

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life - Fernand Braudel

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands (Robert Conquest)

'Everyone falsifies history even if it is only his own personal history. Sometimes the falsification is deliberate, sometimes unconscious; put always the past is altered to suit the needs of the present. The best we can say of any account is not that it is the real truth at last, but that this is how the story appears now'. - Joseph Freeman

'Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections'. - Johan Huizinga

Every past is worth condemning - Nietzsche

'Every day grows more amnesiac about its recent past'. - Hilton Kramer

'Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.' - Dean Inge (1860-1954) British churchman

Each age writes the history of the past with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time - Frederick Turner

'Do not applaud me. It is not I who speaks to you, but history which speaks through my mouth'. - Fustel de Coulanges

Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion (Oscar Wilde)

'Contemporary history is the least valuable of all kinds. The relative importance of events and persons cannot be fairly estimated till time has tested them and shown which is great and which is small'. - S. O. McConnell

Consciousness of the past alone can make us understand the present. (Herbert Luethy)

'Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis'. - Schopenhauer

'Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians'. - Joseph J. Ellis

'Binary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived'. - Ira Berlin

'Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me'. - Albert Camus

'At the heart of good history is a naughty little secret: good storytelling'. - Stephen Schiff

'At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself'. - E. P. Thompson

'Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more'. - Geoffrey Barraclough

'Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it.' - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish playwright

'Any time gone by was better'. - Jorge Manrique

'Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences'. - Michel Ralph Trouillot

'Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it'. - Oscar Wilde

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view - Samuel Eliot Morison

'Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History'. - Thomas Carlyle

'All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know'. - Tsiolkovsky

'All modern wars start in the history classroom'. - Anonymous

'After the collection of facts, the search for causes'. - Hippolyte Taine

A society sure of its values had needed history only to celebrate the glories of the past, but a society of changing values and consequent confusions also needed history as a utilitarian guide. (Thomas Cochran)

'A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians'. - Henry Adams

'A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it'. - Paul Horgan

'A page of history is worth a book of mathematics.' - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1808 - 1864), American journalist

'A new future requires a new past'. - Eric Foner

A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do - Woodrow Wilson

A mere collector of supposed facts is as useful as a collector of matchboxes. (Lucien Febvre)

'A man without a bias cannot write interesting history – if indeed such a man exists.' - Bertrand Russell (1967)

'A man who does not respect his ancestors is worse than a wild animal.' - American Indian saying

'A historian has many duties. Allow me to remind you of two which are important. The first is not to slander; the second is not to bore'. - Voltaire

'A country without a memory is a country of madmen'. - George Santayana

'A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end'. - J. B. Bury

'‘History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.' - Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) German statesman

'[Some historians hold that history] is just one damned thing after another'. - Arnold Toynbee

'[I]f one has an exaggerated view of the past, then one is obviously going to have a diminished view of the present'. - Joseph Nye

'[History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman'. - Thomas Carlyle

'[History] is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes'. - Voltaire

'[History] is a closeout sale of new and old public myths'. - Anton Kaes

[History] distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable - Macaulay

'[History was] a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss'. - W. Stull Holt

'[History is] the most difficult of all the sciences.' - Fustel de Coulanges

'[History is] the doubtful story of successive events'. - Bosanquet

'[History is] not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments. Geoffrey Barraclough

'[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind'. - Edward Gibbon

'[History is] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties'. - Voltaire

'[History is] an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs.' - Gordon Wood