History is philosophy teaching by examples.
~Thucydides
History is a pageant and not a philosophy.
~Augustine Birrell
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A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.
~Lawrence M Krauss
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
~Thomas Carlyle
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The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
~Eric Hoffer
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
History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
~Ambrose Bierce
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
~Edward Gibbon
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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
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
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
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
~African Proverb
History Quotes
History Quotes
All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in, or whenever you impose yourself upon, a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
~June Jordan
Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.
~John Terraine
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
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
~Herodotus
History: gossip well told.
~Charles Angoff
Skepticism is history's bedfellow.
~Edgar Saltus
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
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History is the discipline closest to life; and life is rarely free of contradictions.
~Karl J Weintraub
A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.
~Thomas Babington Macaulay
The historian amputates reality.
~Gaetano Salvemini
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History is past politics, and politics present history.
~John Robert Seeley
More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.
~John Barth
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
~Thurgood Marshall
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Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
~Thomas Sowell
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
~H G Wells
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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
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
~Rebecca West
A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents.
~Richard Reeves
Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. All teachers know this. In consequence, they bowdlerize, but to bowdlerize political history is not to simplify but to falsify it. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.
~W H Auden
The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.
~Michel de Montaigne
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
~Mason Cooley
No less than the tourist, the writer of history profits from maps.
~Charles F Mullett
Nothing capable of being memorized is history.
~Robin G Collingwood
History, sir, will tell lies as usual.
~George Bernard Shaw
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
~Matthew Arnold
History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.
~W Stull Holt
No volume of history is insignificant, even the worst chapters. Especially the worst chapters.
~Terri Guillemets
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
~Jean Genet
Terraine
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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
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
~L P Hartley
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History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.
~Walter Rauschenbusch
It was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.
~John Toland
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Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.
~Thomas A Bailey
History is stained with the bloody ink of truth — beware historians who whitewash.
~Terri Guillemets
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
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History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
~Martin Luther King, Jr
What you do is your history. What you set
in motion is your legacy.
~Leonard Sweet
The only thing new in the world is the history
don't know.
~Harry S Truman
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History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second
as farce.
~Karl Marx
Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
~Author Unknown
~ ~
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
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 various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
~Edward Gibbon
History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
~Ambrose Bierce
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History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
~James Baldwin
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
~Pearl Buck
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A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
~Henry Adams
Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.
~Goethe
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.
~Thomas Carlyle
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
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
~Alexis de Tocqueville
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
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
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History begins in novel and ends in essay.
~Thomas Babington Macaulay
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
~Plato
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
~Aristotle
It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
~Thomas Carlyle
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
~Theodor Adorno
Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
~Walter Savage Landor
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 Penn Warren
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
~H L Mencken
It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.
~Leopold von Ranke
To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
~Roy Basler
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
~Henry James
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
~Henry James
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Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
~Will and Ariel Durant
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
~Mark Twain
In the Cornell Library of 40,000 volumes there are no novels. There is, however, plenty of fiction in the histories and philosophies.
~Mary Wilson Little
The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?
~Katharine Anthony
As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.
~Walt Whitman
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History is the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.
~Robert S Lynd
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?
~John Leonard
Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.
~Bruce Catton
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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
~Samuel Butler
A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.
~Karl Kraus
People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery.
~Aristide Briand
When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
~Shailer Mathews
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
~Leo Tolstoy
Princes should have more to fear from historians than have ugly women from great painters.
~Antonio Pérez
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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
History is a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
~William Carlos Williams
Historians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous. ~Robert Stinson
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
~Jessamyn West
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History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.
~Donald Creighton
History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others.
~Voltaire
Some people make headlines while others make history.
~Philip Elmer-DeWitt
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
~Thomas Carlyle
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
~Napoleon Bonaparte
Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa
Antoine-Jean Gros
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
~Napoleon Bonaparte
A new future requires a new past.
~Eric Foner
He wrote victories with the national pen.
~Terri Guillemets
History is the propaganda of the victors.
~Ernst Toller
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
~Adolf Hitler
No modern idea has affected history more than the passion of nationalism.
~Charles R Poinsatte
The study of history is the playground of patriotism.
~George M Wrong
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.
~Pieter Geyl
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History does not unfold: it piles up.
~Robert M Adams
History is man's best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order.
~Robert Brault
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Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
~Thomas Carlyle
More and more, I tend to read history. I often find it more up to date than the daily newspapers.
~Joe Murray
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Truly great history is not subtle. It smacks you in the face. You know it at the time you're watching it — you're seeing something that's for the ages.
~Tom Verducci
There certainly is no useful or entertaining history but the history of the day.
~Voltaire
The obscurest epoch is today.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Events in the past may roughly be
divided into those which probably never
happened and those which do not matter.
~W R Inge
History is a pack of lies about events that
never happened told by people who
weren't there.
~George Santayana
History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.
~Zbigniew Brzezinski
Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them.
~Guy Fregault
Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes.
~Jean Jaures
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
~David McCullough
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
~Barbara Tuchman
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
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
History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
~John F Kennedy
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
The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.
~G R Elton
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
~George Orwell
All ancient histories, as one of our wits has observed, are only fables that men have agreed to admit as true; and with regard to modern history, it is a chaos out of which it is impossible to make anything...
~Voltaire
That is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
~Jacques Barzun
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
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
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
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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 through rebellion.
~Oscar Wilde
Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural as an oak tree. It comes out of the past; its foundations are laid far back.
~Wendell Phillips
I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
Fidel Castro
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Radical historians now tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. ~Mason Cooley
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
~Jawaharlal Nehru
History is politics projected into the past.
~M N Pokrovsky
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If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
~Baruch Spinoza
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
~Winston Churchill
We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.
~Adolf von Harnack
That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
John Buchan
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Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.
~Oscar Wilde
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
~Winston Churchill
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
Otto von Bismarck
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
~A Whitney Brown
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If you think you have it tough, read history books.
~Bill Maher
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
~John W Gardner
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
~Voltaire
Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie
Willem Claesz.Heda
History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.
~Hajo Holborn
I believe that history is not made by cynics. It is made by realists who are not afraid to dream. Let us be these people.
~Tzipi Livni
History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance.
~R Jackson Wilson
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