A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.
History Quotes
Carlyle leads by count, with Yuval Noah Harari, Will Durant and Isaac Asimov close behind. The sourced picks include Karl Popper’s claim in The Open Society (1945) that there is no history of mankind, only many histories of aspects of human life, and Oscar Wilde’s line from 1891 that anybody can make history but only a great man can write it.
The Churchill line “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it” is flagged as misattributed. What the notes give is his House of Commons speech of 23 January 1948, in which he proposed to leave the past to history, especially as he intended to write that history. A line on Anglo-Irish history credited to Shaw is flagged too, and the notes record the more common, punchier version of it.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!
Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.
History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.