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.
This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history.
The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.
France has done more for even English history than England has.
All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.
The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.
Every period in history has its own punishments, and ours has a multitude.