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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.

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Most quoted on history:

Dharampal is now perhaps the best authority on a most significant period of India's history....

Ram Swarup Hinduism and monotheistic religions (2009)

We want to rewrite the history from our perspective, and not the perspective of what we read, which is often negatively biased towards Africa.

Adji Bousso Dieng

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist (1891)

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Winston Churchill

In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.

Albert Camus The Rebel (1951)

GRUBSTREET — The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.

Samuel Johnson A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.

Buckminster Fuller Grunch of Giants (1983)

History is a story without an end.

Isaac Asimov The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965)

In my small way I have been fighting for years against the systematic faking of history which now goes on.

George Orwell

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

Emil Cioran History and Utopia (1960)

It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it!

Steve Jobs

They're lying bastards. Jews were always lying bastards throughout their history. They're a filthy, dirty, disgusting, vile, criminal people.

Bobby Fischer

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

Elie Wiesel

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

Gertrude Stein Wars I Have Seen (1945)

But history tells us that true progress is only possible where governments exist to serve their people, and not the other way around.

Barack Obama Cape Town University Address (2013)

History is scraps of evidence joined by the glue of imagination.

Subhash Kak The Wishing Tree (2015)

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

Haruki Murakami Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.

Celia Green The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess.

Martin Van Buren Inaugural address (1837)

History is a vast early warning system.

Norman Cousins

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