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:

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

Michael Crichton Timeline (1999)

I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history—certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you.

Poul Anderson

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, when a truth that fired the soul of St. John, fires mine, time is no more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No honest historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.

John W. Campbell Analog Science Fiction/Fact magazine (1965)