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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.

Random quote on History

Most quoted on history:

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Thomas Carlyle

History hath but few pages—soon is told
Man’s ordinary life,
Labour, and care, and strife,
Make up the constant chronicle of old.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“It can’t make things any worse.”
“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend.

Neil Gaiman Fragile Things (2006)

History teaches, but it has no pupils.

Antonio Gramsci

While we read history we make history ... Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer.

George William Curtis

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

The problem of locating photos often confirms the indifference to women’s presence in history, as reflected in the media, books, historical records, museums, university libraries.

Elizabeth Martinez

There is properly no history, only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

History casts its shadow far into the land of song.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Mark Twain

We hope, plan, execute; will it be vain?
Or will the future be the past again?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Romance and Reality (1831)

I started to think why people feel comfortable disrespecting us in a way that’s just not normal or natural. And I started to think that it's because our contributions aren't in history textbooks.

John Leguizamo

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.

Tacitus

[History] hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.

Walter Raleigh The History of the World (1614)

The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.

Niall Ferguson

History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past—to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.

Ian Mortimer The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England (2008)

With all regimes, there is what might be called an official interpretation of the past that makes it appear defective or just a step on the way to the present regime.

Allan Bloom

God cannot alter the past, historians can

Samuel Butler

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