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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.

Random quote on History

Most quoted on history:

History is. We cannot make it otherwise.

Stokely Carmichael Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)

Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain.

Bertolt Brecht The Trial of Lucullus (1940)

Anything but history, for history must be false.

Robert Walpole

I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.

Dejan Stojanovic The Sun Watches the Sun (1999)

Rigorous presentation of the facts, however conditional and lacking in beauty they may be, is without question the supreme law.

Leopold von Ranke

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

Jacob Burckhardt Judgements on History and Historians (1929)

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

Thomas Carlyle

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

Thomas Carlyle

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Gore Vidal

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress.

H. G. Wells The Outline of History (1920)

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Voices of the Night (1839)

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Emil Cioran History and Utopia (1960)

In Russia, history is something that, you know, used to be rewritten every five years. It's written once again, and it's just a game.

Victor Pelevin

History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been.

Joseph Stalin

In the end, young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history.

John Howard

War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

Will Durant

All things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle.

Marcus Aurelius

History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large.

Will Durant

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Lawrence Durrell The Listener (1978)

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