history quotes

Adrienne Rich: 

False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news.

Alex Haley: 

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Ambrose Bierce: 

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Andre Trocme: 

All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rather they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

David Ben Gurion: 

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

David C. McCullough: 

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough: 

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

Denise Levertov: 

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

E. L. Doctorow: 

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Edward Gibbon: 

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Etienne Gilson: 

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

Friedrich Von Schiller: 

The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

George Bernard Shaw: 

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

George Bernard Shaw: 

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Santayana: 

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

George Wilhelm Hegel: 

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

Gerda Lerner: 

What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are 'the lessons of history'? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.

Gerda Lerner: 

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Goethe: 

Patriotism ruins history.

Gustave Flaubert: 

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Henry Ford: 

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want 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: 

History is more or less bunk.

Henry Steele Commager: 

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.

Jane Austen: 

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. 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 - it is very tiresome. (spoken by Catherine Morland in 'Northanger Abbey')

Jane Haddam: 

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.

Jawaharial Nehru: 

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Karl Marx: 

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Karl Marx: 

It is not "history" which uses men as a means of achieving -- as if it were an individual person -- its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Karl Marx: 

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this

Kurt Vonnegut: 

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: 

Well behaved women rarely make history.

Louise Otto: 

The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that ... women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.

Mark Twain: 

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Mark Twain: 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Maya Angelou: 

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Norman Cousins: 

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history comes to life.

Oscar Wilde: 

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Patricia Hampl: 

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Paul Valery: 

History is the science of what never happens twice.

Pearl S. Buck: 

One faces the future with one's past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: 

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Peter Berger: 

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

Peter Burke: 

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Make the most of yourself for that is all there is of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

There is properly no history; only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

Reinhold Niebuhr: 

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Robert F. Kennedy: 

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert Fulghum: 

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Sir Walter Scott: 

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Tennesse Claflin: 

The history of woman is the history of the continued and universal oppression of one sex by the other. The emancipation of woman is her restoration to equal rights and privileges with man.

Thich Nhat Hanh: 

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thomas Carlyle: 

History, a distillation of rumour.

Thucydides: 

History is Philosophy teaching by examples.

Vita Sackville-West: 

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.

Walt Whitman: 

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

Will Durant: 

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Winston Churchill: 

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.