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.
Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now.
Here at the crossroads of our history, we need to turn our backs on the past.
That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is.
For in the last analysis it is human consciousness which is the subject matter of history.
My family history is made of migration; it’s something that’s part of my own complexity.
“As we remember, today is not only about reflecting on the painful history we endured.”