Quote: Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. Author: Francis Bacon 1561-1626, British Philosopher, Essayist, Statesman
Quote: It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment. Author: Francis Bacon 1561-1626, British Philosopher, Essayist, Statesman
Quote: To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine. Author: Sir Max Beerbohm 1872-1956, British Actor
Quote: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. Author: Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914, American Author, Editor, Journalist, ''The Devil's Dictionary''
Quote: Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip. Author: Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914, American Author, Editor, Journalist, ''The Devil's Dictionary''
Quote: The main thing is to make history, not to write it. Author: Otto Von Bismarck 1815-1898, Prussian Statesman, Prime Minister
Quote: From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us. Author: Napoleon Bonaparte 1769-1821, French General, Emperor
Quote: People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors. Author: Edmund Burke 1729-1797, British Political Writer, Statesman
Quote: The Thames is liquid history. Author: John Burns
Quote: God cannot alter the past, but historians can. Author: Samuel Butler 1612-1680, British Poet, Satirist
Quote: And having wisdom with each studious year, in meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, and shaped his weapon with an edge severe, sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer. Author: Lord Byron 1788-1824, British Poet
Quote: History is the devil's scripture. Author: Lord Byron 1788-1824, British Poet
Quote: In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history. Author: Albert Camus 1913-1960, French Existential Writer
Quote: History is the distillation of rumor. Author: Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author
Quote: Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles. Author: Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author
Quote: The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Author: Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author
Quote: The whole past is the procession of the present. Author: Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author
Quote: For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future. Author: Miguel De Cervantes 1547-1616, Spanish Novelist, Dramatist, Poet
Quote: History is but a confused heap of facts. Author: Lord Chesterfield 1694-1773, British Statesman, Author
Quote: Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton 1874-1936, British Author
Quote: For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself. Author: Winston Churchill 1874-1965, British Statesman, Prime Minister
Quote: Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. Author: Marcus T. Cicero c. 106-43 BC, Great Roman Orator, Politician
Quote: The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves. Author: Marcus T. Cicero c. 106-43 BC, Great Roman Orator, Politician
Quote: The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent. Author: Peter Conrad 1948-, Australian Critic, Author
Quote: What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted. Author: Oliver Cromwell 1599-1658, Parliamentarian General, Lord Protector of England
Quote: While we read history we make history. Author: George William Curtis 1824-1892, American Journalist
Quote: History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history. Author: Clarence Darrow 1857-1938, American Lawyer
Quote: The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present. Author: Ernest Dimnet 1866-1954, French Clergyman
Quote: One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. Author: William J. Durant 1885-1981, American Historian, Essayist
Quote: Our best history is still poetry. Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist
Quote: Might does not make right, it only makes history. Author: Jim Fiebig
Quote: I can see only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. Author: H(erbert) A(lbert) L(aurens) Fisher 1865-1940, British Writer
Quote: Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. Author: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880, French Novelist
Quote: History is more or less bunk. Author: Henry Ford 1863-1947, American Industrialist, Founder of Ford Motor Company
Quote: The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. Author: Edward M. Forster 1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist
Quote: History books that contain no lies are extremely dull. Author: Anatole France 1844-1924, French Writer
Quote: The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies. Author: James A. Froude 1818-1894, British Historian
Quote: The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders. Author: R. Buckminster Fuller 1895-1983, American Inventor, Designer, Poet, Philosopher
Quote: To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man. Author: Mahatma Gandhi 1869-1948, Indian Political, Spiritual Leader
Quote: History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Author: Edward Gibbon 1737-1794, British Historian
Quote: He is the purest figure in history. [About George Washington] Author: William E. Gladstone 1809-1888, British Liberal Prime Minister, Statesman
Quote: The history of mankind is his character. Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist
Quote: History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other. Author: Philip Guedalla 1889-1944, British Writer
Quote: The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. Author: Friedrich Hegel
Quote: A generation which ignores history has no past and no future. Author: Robert Heinlein 1907-1988, American Science Fiction Writer
Quote: You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present. Author: Hermann Hesse 1877-1962, German-born Swiss Novelist, Poet
Quote: The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. Author: Eric Hoffer 1902-1983, American Author, Philosopher
Quote: A page of history is worth a pound of logic. Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet
Quote: Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads. Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet
Quote: One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other. Author: Victor Hugo 1802-1885, French Poet, Dramatist, Novelist
Quote: It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out. Author: Sarah Orne Jewett 1849-1909, American Author
Quote: Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary. Author: Samuel Johnson 1709-1784, British Author
Quote: Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Author: Robert F. Kennedy 1925-1968, American Attorney General, Senator
Quote: History is a better guide than good intentions. Author: Jeane Kirkpatrick 1926-, American Stateswoman, Academic
Quote: Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history. Author: Alphonse De Lamartine 1790-1869, French Poet, Statesman, Historian
Quote: History tells us more than we want to know about what is wrong with man, and we can hardly turn a page in the daily press without learning the specific time, place, and name of evil. But perhaps the most pervasive evil of all rarely appears in the news. This evil, the waste of human potential, is particularly painful to recognize for it strikes our parents and children, our friends and brothers, ourselves. Author: George Leonard
Quote: Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. Author: Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865, Sixteenth President of the USA
Quote: History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires. Author: Thomas B. Macaulay 1800-1859, American Essayist and Historian
Quote: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Author: Karl Marx 1818-1883, German Political Theorist, Social Philosopher
Quote: Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist. Author: H. L. Mencken 1880-1956, American Editor, Author, Critic, Humorist
Quote: The men who make history have not time to write it. Author: Klemens Von Metternich 1773-1859, Austrian Statesman
Quote: I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all; they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy. Author: Michel Eyquem De Montaigne 1533-1592, French Philosopher, Essayist
Quote: It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do. Author: Benito Mussolini 1883-1945, Italian Prime Minister (1922--43) and Dictator
Quote: To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days. Author: Plutarch 46-120 AD, Greek Essayist, Biographer
Quote: Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. Author: African Proverb Sayings of African Origin
Quote: However gradual the course of history, there must always be the day, even an hour and minute, when some significant action is performed for the first or last time. Author: Peter Quennell
Quote: Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time. Author: Sir Walter Raleigh 1552-1618, British Courtier, Navigator, Writer
Quote: A land without ruins is a land without memories -- a land without memories is a land without history. Author: Abram Joseph Ryan
Quote: History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. Author: George Santayana 1863-1952, American Philosopher, Poet
Quote: Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot. Author: Simon Schama
Quote: Historians are prophets with their face turned backward. Author: Johann Friedrich Von Schiller 1759-1805, German Dramatist, Poet, Historian
Quote: There is a history in all men's lives. Author: William Shakespeare 1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor
Quote: Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian -- ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Author: Lytton Strachey
Quote: Study men, not historians. Author: Harry S. Truman 1884-1972, Thirty-third President of the USA
Quote: History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal. Author: Mark Twain 1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer
Quote: Every time history repeats itself the price goes up. Author: Source Unknown
Quote: History is one of the most remarkable things in our lives. The mere fact it occurred makes it remarkable. Author: Source Unknown
Quote: Never forget the importance of history. To know nothing of what happened before you took your place on earth, is to remain a child for ever and ever. Author: Source Unknown
Quote: Caesar had perished from the world of men, had not his sword been rescued by his pen. Author: Henry Vaughan 1622-1695, Welsh Poet
Quote: History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes. Author: Voltaire 1694-1778, French Historian, Writer
Quote: History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead. Author: Voltaire 1694-1778, French Historian, Writer
Quote: We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience. Author: George Washington 1732-1799, First President of the USA
Quote: History is a race between education and catastrophe. Author: H.G. Wells 1866-1946, British-born American Author
Quote: Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. Author: H.G. Wells 1866-1946, British-born American Author
Quote: Human history in essence is the history of ideas. Author: H.G. Wells 1866-1946, British-born American Author
Quote: Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. Author: Oscar Wilde 1856-1900, British Author, Wit
Quote: To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Author: Oscar Wilde 1856-1900, British Author, Wit