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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:

This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.

Livy

The stone in my hand hides
A secret natural history:
Climates and times unknown,
A river unseen.

Brian Aldiss The Small Stones of Tu Fu (1978)

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

Ralph Bakshi

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas — a place where history comes to life.

Norman Cousins

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.

Kenneth Boulding

Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.

Antonio Negri

This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written...

Heinrich Himmler

Profane history shows that the Lacedaemonians, who were gentiles, did not practice capital punishment; but they imprisoned them and them at labor.

Menno Simons

I considered, that history is the inexhaustible mine, out of which political knowledge is to be brought up.

James Burgh Political Disquisitions (1774)

"Each day has its own destiny. Yesterday is history, today is opportunity while tomorrow is mystery."

T. B. Joshua

Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.

China Miéville Iron Council (2004)

The history of Canada has been profoundly influenced by the habits of an animal which very fittingly occupies a prominent place on her coat of arms.

Harold Innis The Fur Trade in Canada (1930)

This was unrecorded history, unhappening even as it happened.

Robert Charles Wilson The Cartesian Theater (2006)

I suppose, as a politician, I should be content, for the Canada Pension Plan certainly put my name in Canada's history books, and in italics.

Judy LaMarsh Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969)

A fine thing: suddenly to forget about one’s history, one’s past, to stop feeling that one’s present happiness is endangered by what one used to be.

Peter Handke

At a very early stage in history we are encountering "survivorship bias" - the fact that only the best results tend to show up in the history books.

William J. Bernstein The Four Pillars of Investing (2002)

I am quite sick of the modern writers of ancient history, who think to make amends by their fine language for the total want of industry, truth and candour.

Joseph Ritson

For philosophy and history alike have taught...to seek not what is "safe," but what is true.

Henry Sidgwick

Every society in human history that has ever given itself over to government by intellectuals has lived to regret it. Ours will be no different.

Curtis Yarvin

Our history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.

James Nasmyth

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