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 mixture of highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in our history.
For the upper classes all periods in history have been golden; for the masses none.
All history is contemporary history; you can't get away from the politics around you.
Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.
Today will go down in history as a dark one indeed for UK democracy.
History is not just shaped by action, but by inaction as well.
The history of paper money is an account of abuse, mismanagement, and financial disaster.
I think history will regard Hitler as one of the great men of our time.
In all lands, whether for him or against him, Stalin created history.
A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.
Fanatics throughout history have always been convinced of the virtuousness of their visions.
But hey, women who make history do not succumb to societal pressure.
History and experience are the two master teachers of nations and civilization.
You can take your unfortunate history and use it to grow, to be even better.