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.
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!
I am proud to be an Ethiopian. I am proud to be a part of that history.
The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people.
I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write.
Is history repeating itself? Not really, we are the ones repeating history.