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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:

The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

To seek to abolish history is the ambition of a fool. For a land without history is a barren island in an uncharted sea. To tear up the roots is to destroy the tree.

Robert Menzies Melbourne Scots - 'Father and Son' Night address (1968)

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.

Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet

Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus.
You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.

Will Durant

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist (1891)

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

The value of history ... is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History (1946)

History is just as much a science as chemistry or physics. It has its own laws, it has its own logic.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza

It is a confusion to present the items of one sort in the idioms of another -- without awareness. For to do this is not just to cross two different sorts; it is to confuse them. It is to mistake, for example, the theory for the fact, the procedure for the process, the myth for history, the model for the thing and the metaphor for the face of literal truth.

Colin Murray Turbayne The Myth of Metaphor (1962)

History has always changed its course, changed its stance, swaying to the tunes, pendulum like, between a Ruling Party and an Opposition Party.

Tapan Kumar Pradhan

All history is a Bible—a thing stated in words by me more than once.

Thomas Carlyle

In this valley of trees and river and crystal,
the fault lines of history broke.

Linda Hogan Dark. Sweet.: New & Selected Poems (2014)

History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority

Theodore Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

A. J. P. Taylor English History 1914–1945 (1965)

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

Will Durant The Age of Faith (1950)

If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.

Howard Zinn

History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature.

Pieter Geyl Napoleon For and Against (1949)

History admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.

David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (2004)

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.

John Buchan

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