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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:

They (Thucydides and Xenophon) maintained the dignity of history.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

My history of lending money from banks is that they want to know the ins and outs of the backside of a duck.

Alan Sugar

In the history of medicine, there are few instances in which a disease has been more accurately, more graphically or more briefly described.

William Osler

You have only got to look at the pages of British imperial history to hide your head in shame that you are British.

Stafford Cripps

Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?

Charles III

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history..

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (1969)

Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.

William Winwood Reade The Martyrdom of Man (1872)

Blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.

Thomas Jefferson

I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.

Don DeLillo

History is always written from the viewpoints of the leaders. And increasingly, in our age, war leaders do not get shot at with any serious consistency.

James Jones WWII (1975)

Humanity’s whole unfortunate history is one long account of how we attack what we don’t understand, what’s strange to us.

Charles de Lint

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.

John Barth The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

It sounds rather silly, doesn’t it? One little man thinking he can change history all by his lonesome. A lot of trouble has been caused by that delusion.

Poul Anderson The Long Way Home (1955)

Much written history is an ideologically safe commodity.

Michael Parenti History as Mystery (1999)

History has many unanswered questions, but it is no mystery as such—except for those who make it so.

Michael Parenti History as Mystery (1999)

The tree of human history, as it has grown from age to age, has been but the unfolding of a single germ — but the development of Christ and Him crucified.

John McClellan Holmes Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

We are at last beginning to relegate to the history books the idea of the token woman.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to history.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.

Robert Charles Wilson Burning Paradise (2013)

Let June 23 go down in our history as our independence day.

Nigel Farage

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