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.
I hate it when they tell us how far we came to be, as if our people's history started with slavery.
As they take eye for an eye until no one can see,
we must stumble blindly forward, repeating history.
Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history.
Every day, create your History
Every path you take, you're leaving your legacy.
The lesson of History is rarely learned by the actors themselves.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in its origins, its transmission was oral.
Throughout our whole history the United States has been facing westward.