quotations about history
History is mainly a record of wars, and it has bequeathed the sorry fact that still nations devote more money to armies and navies than they do to education or the arts.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
History ... is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
EDWARD GIBBON
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
JOHN STILL
The Jungle Tide
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
WASHINGTON IRVING
The Sketch Book
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes and Hero-Worship
The only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
HENRY FORD
Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916
History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.
ANTONIO TABUCCHI
Pereira Maintains
History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
History -- the product, not the raw material -- is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Black Sea
ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY -- DON'T.
LORD ACTON
postscript of letter to Mandell Creighton, Apr. 5, 1887
History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Collected Essays
The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer and iPod.
LAURA PENNY
More Money Than Brains
History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.
HOWARD ZINN
interview, Rawstory, Sep. 9, 2005
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1995
I long for the time when all the human history is taught as one history, because it really is one history.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, Feb. 28, 2013
Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Antiquity
At any rate, the pre-historic times were spent in making men capable of writing a history, and having something to put in it when it is written, and we can see how it was done.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
History is a compendium of uncertainties.
E. P. DAY
Day's Collacon