quotations about history
The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.
TANITH LEE
The Gods are Thirsty
History is philosophy teaching by example.
HENRY ST. JOHN BOLINGBROKE
Letters on the Study and Use of History
History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
preface, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988
History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
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
A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Half the things you've been taught in school are just convenient fictions. History is a puppet show for childish minds.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
History is only time furnished with dates and rich with events.
RIVAROL
attributed, Day's Collacon
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The Devils of Loudun
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
MAO ZEDONG
"On Coalition Government", Apr. 24, 1945
The best historian lies like a mirror.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Lapham's Quarterly, 2008
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
There is a history in all men's lives.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Henry IV, Part II
History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.
CAROL TAVRIS & ELLIOT ARONSON
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. WELLS
The Outline of History
Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning