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 human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.
The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.
What’s the point of history, if it has nothing to say to the present?
In history, the arrival of a small man in a big hat is rarely good news.
Throughout history, people have never before expected to be as comfortable as people do today.
I don't think the intellectual battle is ever fully over because I don't think history is over.