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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
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
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