quotations about history
Half the things you've been taught in school are just convenient fictions. History is a puppet show for childish minds.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
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
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
TONI MORRISON
Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998
History is a struggle between the "old" right that intended to be just and the "new" that promises to be.
REINHARD BENDIX
Truth and Ideology
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
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
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 historian's task is to present what actually happened. The more purely and completely he achieves this, the more perfectly has he solved this problem. A simple presentation is at the same time the primary indispensable condition of his work and the highest achievement he will be able to attain. Regarded in this way, he seems to be merely receptive and productive, not active and creative.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT
"The Historian's Task"
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
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
MAO ZEDONG
"On Coalition Government", Apr. 24, 1945
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
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The Devils of Loudun
History is not fable agreed upon, but truth disagreed upon.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
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
History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
History is more or less bunk.
HENRY FORD
Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916
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 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
History is a relay of revolutions.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals