HISTORY QUOTES VI

quotations about history

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

KARL MARX

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Tags: Karl Marx


The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Theses on the Philosophy of History

Tags: Walter Benjamin


This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Theses on the Philosophy of History

Tags: Walter Benjamin


He who thoroughly understands the present epoch, must have reproduced, and lived through, in his private experience, all the religions, dispensations, and civilizations that preceded it.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

Remarks on the Science of History

Tags: William Batchelder Greene


If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Prelude to Foundation

Tags: Isaac Asimov


One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.

CARL SAGAN

The Demon-Haunted World

Tags: Carl Sagan


Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Angel's Game


Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

ZADIE SMITH

White Teeth


He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.

CHRIS ABANI

The Secret History of Las Vegas


The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

JULIAN BARNES

The Sense of an Ending

Tags: Julian Barnes


There is a history in all men's lives.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Henry IV, Part II

Tags: William Shakespeare


History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.

T.S. ELIOT

Gerontion

Tags: T. S. Eliot


History is a relay of revolutions.

SAUL ALINSKY

Rules for Radicals

Tags: Saul Alinsky


Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

DON DELILLO

Underworld

Tags: Don DeLillo


Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.

MALCOLM X

Message to the Grass Roots, Nov. 10, 1963


People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI

Eragon

Tags: Christopher Paolini


A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Tags: Robert A. Heinlein


History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

MAYA ANGELOU

On the Pulse of the Morning

Tags: Maya Angelou


History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

2666

Tags: Roberto Bolaño