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.
History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer and iPod.
History is written by the victors, but its victims who write the memoirs.
History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.
We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been.