Quotations about 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 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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 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
• 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
• 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
• 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 a pageant and not a philosophy. --Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta: The Muse of History
• 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
• 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