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.
It really is true that the history of your people and your land is in the human body.
You may write me down in history, but still like dust, I rise.
We don’t keep records of our history and this is a sad reality of who we are.
Literature is in other countries the bed-rock of history, in India it is often a snare.
History’s made of surprises that seem obvious in retrospect.
History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect.
“History will remember conquerors by their victories. It will remember us by our compromises.”
To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you."