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.
The history of free men is never really written by chance-but by choice-their choice.
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.
Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.
We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.
Never in history has such ruination – physical and moral – been associated with the name of one man.