quotations about history
The true science of history, for instance, does not yet exist; scarcely do we begin to-day to catch a glimpse of its extremely complicated conditions. But suppose it were definitely developed, what could it give us? It would exhibit a faithful and rational picture of the natural development of the general conditions--material and ideal, economical, political and social, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific--of the societies which have a history. But this universal picture of human civilization, however detailed it might be, would never show anything beyond general and consequently abstract estimates. The milliards of individuals who have furnished the living and suffering materials of this history at once triumphant and dismal--triumphant by its general results, dismal by the immense hecatomb of human victims "crushed under its car"--those milliards of obscure individuals without whom none of the great abstract results of history would have been obtained--and who, bear in mind, have never benefited by any of these results--will find no place, not even the slightest, in our annals. They have lived and been sacrificed, crushed for the good of abstract humanity, that is all.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Old men can make war, but it is children who will make history.
RAY MERRITT
Full of Grace
You know you're getting older when you notice that more and more history questions happened in your lifetime!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jul. 3, 1999
History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past.
DANA ARNOLD
Reading Architectural History
History, with scarcely an exception, ought to be rewritten.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Last of the Mohicans
The vividness and force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on things.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, March 15, 1880
History is replete with the bleached bones of nations.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
speech delivered at the Great March on Detroit, June 23, 1963
Every historian has described the age in which he happened to write, as the worst, because he has only heard of the wickedness of other times, but has felt and seen that of his own.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
History. It has always vaguely interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of previous deaths.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to John Adams, August 1, 1816
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PLATO
Ion