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.
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.
I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.
You can't question a people's history and you can't insult the Algerians.
Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.
History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster.
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
For those impervious to history, only sterilization and quarantine are efficacious.
The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.