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:

The Hellenization of Rome was, of course, the most important cultural conquest that the Hellenes ever achieved at any stage of their history.

Arnold J. Toynbee A Study of History (1934)

Underneath all the arches of Scripture history, throughout the whole grand temple of the Scriptures, these two voices ever echo, man is ruined, man is redeemed.

Cyrus David Foss

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

David R. Henderson

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

Martin Luther King Jr. The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Karl Marx