quotations about history
Myths ... collected like barnacles on history, obscuring the truth.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.
TANITH LEE
The Gods are Thirsty
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. WELLS
The Outline of History
Each day is a little bit of history.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
REBECCA WEST
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
History is only time furnished with dates and rich with events.
RIVAROL
attributed, Day's Collacon
History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.
CAROL TAVRIS & ELLIOT ARONSON
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
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
History, again, tells us of successive civilizations which have been born, have for a space thriven exceedingly, and have then miserably perished.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
ANNE BRONTE
Agnes Grey
The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Sometimes ... history needs a push.
VLADIMIR LENIN
attributed, Seeds of Revolution: A Collection of Axioms
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs -- the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The Legacy of the Civil War
Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.
RICHARD NIXON
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969
There is a history in all men's lives.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Henry IV, Part II
People are absolutely haunted by [history]. You can see it at the swap meets.
PAMELA LANSDEN
"It's Monterey, Jack", Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1997