Famous Quotes on the Great Track of Time (i.e. History)

"History is the queen of the sciences, and mathematics is the king - or vice-versa." - T.L. Winslow (TLW) (1953-)

Quote count: 649

"Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things." - Cicero (-106 to -43)

"To be ignorant of what happened before one was born is to remain ever a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge." - Cicero (-106 to -43)

"History is the teacher of life" (Historia magistra vitae est)." - Cicero (-106 to -43)

"The man who does not learn is dark, like one walking in the night." - Chinese proverb

"I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand." - Chinese proverb

"A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present." - Confucius (-551 to -479)

"Nothing endures but change." - Heraclitus (-535 to -475)

"The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance." - Herodotus (-484 to -425)

"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects." - Herodotus (-484 to -425)

"History is philosophy teaching by examples." - Thucydides (-471 to -400)

"Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble to find out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear." - Thucydides (-471 to -400)

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." - Plato (-427 to -327)

"Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher theory than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." - Aristotle (-384 to -322)

"If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development." - Aristotle (-384 to -322)

"Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth." - Cicero (-106 to -43)

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid. This above all makes history useful and desirable; it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions. " - Titus Livy (-59 to 17)

"This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." - Tacitus (55-117)

"The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,/ Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,/ Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it." - Omar Khayyam (1048-1122)

"I, indeed, following the true law of history, have never set down any fact that I have not learned from trustworthy speakers or writers." - William of Malmesbury (1080-1143)

"It should be known that history is a discipline that has a great number of approaches." - Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332-1406)

"Again I entered my smithy to work and forge something from the noble material of time past." - Jean Froissart (1337-1405)

"History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity." - James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)

"A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end." - J.B. Bury (1861-1927)

"I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction." - Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

"Writing history requires much that is necessary in fiction. That is, you must have your own light, your own point of view for each scene." - Margaret Leech Pulitzer (1893-1974)

"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life." - Fernand Braudel (1902-1985)

"No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history." - Johan Huizinga (1872-1945)

"Very deep, very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?" - Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

"Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward." - Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

"History teaches everything, including the future." - Alphonse Lamartine (1790-1869)

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana (1863-1952)

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

"While history might not repeat, it rhymes so obviously that one could suggest plagiarism." - David Fromkin (1932-)

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

"The supreme purpose of history is a better world." - Herbert Hoover (1874-1964)

"Any time gone by was better." - Jorge Manrique (1440-1479)

"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living... In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another - namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings." - James Truslow Adams (1878-1949)

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder estroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries." - Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." - Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." - Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"History is reading all that you can as fast as you can and remembering as much as you can." - Lynn Berleffi Darr

"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity." - Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)

"As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation." - Capt. John Smith (1580-1631)

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history." - Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007)

"This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery." - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

"The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964)

"Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"Time is the thief you cannot banish." - Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978)

"You will have Time, that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it." - James Hilton (1900-1954), Lost Horizon

"Time is but the stream I go fishing in." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

"Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold; new things succeed as former things grow old." - Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

"By Nature's law, what may be, may be now; there's no prerogative in human hours. In human hearts what bolder thought can rise, than man's presumption on to-morrow's dawn? Where is to-morrow? In another world." - Edward Young (1683-1765), Night Thoughts

"History is an accumulation of error." - Norman Cousins (1915-1990)

"History is a great dust heap." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"I know so little about any history. How little do I know even about the history of myself." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"[History is] a useless heap of facts." - Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)

"[History] is just one damned thing after another." - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)

"[History is a] costly and superfluous luxury of the understanding." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"History is more or less bunk." - Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"History is the school of princes." - Frederick II the Great of Prussia (1712-86)

"History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it." - Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998)

"History is a set of lies agreed upon." - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"History is written by the winners." - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"All the ancient histories, as one of our wits says, are just fables that have been agreed upon." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler." - Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

"The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one." - Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

"There is no history, only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called history." - Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

"History is not history unless it is the truth." - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." - Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man." - Washington Irving (1783-1859)

"History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"[History is] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery." - Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913)

"Historian: A broad-gauge gossip." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913)

"History: gossip well told... a collection of epitaphs." - Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

"History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; priviledging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof." - Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

"History is where tensions were." - Howard Nemerov (1920-1991), The Blue Swallows

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles." - Gilbert Highet (1906-1978)

"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results." - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

"Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences." - Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)

A nation's attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul and the men and women of such a nation cannot be expected to meet the great obligations of the present if they refuse to exhibit honesty, charity, open-mindedness, and a free and growing intelligence toward the past that has made them what they are." - Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943)

"Since God himself cannot change the past, he is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians." - Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness." - Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

"Raving politics, never at rest - as this poor earth's pale history runs, - / What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?" - Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92)

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

"History has a point of view; it cannot be all things to all people." - Samuel Taylor

"Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"Sin writes histories, goodness is silent." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"The Bible teaches that history began in the Middle East, and someday history will end in the Middle East." - Billy Graham (1918-2018)

"Bible, n. A collection of fantastic legends without any scientific support... full of dark hints, historical mistakes and contradictions." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913)

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction, but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?" - Katharine Anthony (1877-1965)

"Knowledge is of itself one of the highest enjoyments. The ignorant man passes through the world dead to all pleasures, save those of the senses... Every human being has a great mission to perform, noble faculties to cultivate, a vast destiny to accomplish. He should have the means of education, and of exerting freely all the powers of his godlike nature." - Samuel Smiles (1812-1904)

"You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories." - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world... History is the true demonstration of Religion." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"Universal History is... not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"History is the invention of historians." - Napoleon Bonparte (1769-1821)

"Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction." - W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

"It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England." - Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859)

"The stars are dead. The animals will not look./ We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and/ History to the defeated/ may say Alas but cannot help nor pardon." - W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

"If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history." - Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)

"Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history; the same is true of man." - Jean Genet (1910-1986)

"The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power." - Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Rebel

"Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar." - Jefferson Davis (1808-1889)

"History has become more important than ever because of the unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole." - Alfred Kazin (1915-1998)

"In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present." - Simon Schama (1945-)

"Unlike poetry and music, the art of history is cumulative." - John L. Clive (1924-1990)

"History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make." - anon.

"We cannot escape history and neither can we escape a desire to understand it." - anon.

"History is something that happens to other people." - anon.

"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." - Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"The certainty of history seems to be in direct inverse ratio to what we know about it." - anon.

"More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations." - John Barth (1930-), The Sot-Weed Factor

"He is come to open the purple testament of bleeding war." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Richard II, Act 3, Scene 3

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

"They are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

"There is a history in all men's lives." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Henry IV Pt. 2, Act 3, Scene 1

"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings... All murdered; for within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king, keeps Death his court... and with a little pin bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!" - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2

"And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away." - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

"There will always be a connection between the way men contemplate the past and the way in which they contemplate the present." - Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862)

"The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body." - Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

"The consciousness of the past (traditions of the dead generations) weighs like a nightmare on (burden like a mountain) the minds of the living." - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"History, considered merely as a source of amusement, has great advantages over novels and romances, the perusal of which too often debilitates the mind by inflaming the imagination, and corrupts the heart by infusing what may justly be regarded as moral poison. Like works of fiction, history serves to amuse the imagination and interest the passions, not always, indeed, in an equal degree; yet it is free from the corrupting tendencies which too often belong to novels, and has a great superiority over them, inasmuch as it rests on the basis of fact." - Joseph Emerson Worcester (1784-1865)

"History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce." - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection." - William Least Heat-Moon (1940-)

"I have seen the future and it works." - Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936)

"We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past." - G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

"“People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make." - G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

"I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul." - William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire." - T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

"All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of Earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others" - William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)

"Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past." - George Orwell (1903-1950)

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - forever." - George Orwell (1903-1950)

"History is a vast early warning system." - Norman Cousins (1915-1990)

"The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow." - Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

"And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." - Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Dover Beach

"The history of the world is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows, that 'one' is free; the Greek and Roman world, that 'some' are free; the German world knows that 'all' are free", therefore America is the land of the future, and the Absolute will reveal itself one day, perhaps in a contest between North and South America." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

"Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes flight only when the shades of night are gathering." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

"East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat." - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

"Under the Sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the intelligent, nor success to the skillful, but time and chance govern all. For man does not know his time." - Solomon, Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

"Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter, all having been heard is, fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil." - Solomon, Ecclesiastes 12:12-14

"Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the Universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose." - Jacques Lucien Monod (1910-76)

"What is the future? What is the past? What are we? What is the magic fluid that surrounds us and conceals the things we most need to know? We live and die in the midst of marvels." - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"History would be an excellent thing if only it were true." - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

"The only absolute knowledge attainable my man is that life is meaningless." - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

"There is only time that is important: now. It is the most important time because it is the only time that we have any power." - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

"There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life." - Karl Popper (1902-1994)

"Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians." - Joseph John Ellis (1943-)

"History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same." - Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)

"The past is dead? It depends on you. History has been around for years. I know people who've used it." - anon.

"The course of history can be changed but not halted." - Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

"We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?" - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

""The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"What mighty contests rise from trivial things." - Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

"What experience and history teach us is this, that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

"We cannot escape history." - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions." - Ted Koppel (1940-)

"To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government, you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment." - Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994)

"All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know." - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

"I do not believe that history exists apart from the historian. If I try to select a keeper of records, I think it safer, for my comfort at least to choose my own self." - Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)

"History proves nothing because it contains everything."- Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

"Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?" - Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

"That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit." - Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

"Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions." - Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

"History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility." - Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

"History is not a catalogue but... a convincing version of events." - A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990)

"History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work." - A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990)

"History is, indeed, an argument without end." - Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

"History does not usually make real sense until long afterward." - Bruce Catton (1899-1978)

"History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light." - William Lawrence Shirer (1904-1993)

"It's my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it." - Elizabeth Kostova (1964-), The Historian

"People tend to forget that the word 'history' contains the word 'story'." - Ken Burns (1953-)

"At the heart of good history is a naughty little secret: good storytelling." - Stephen Schiff

"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"All modern wars start in the history classroom." - anon.

"History-writing is not a visit of condolence." - Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960)

"Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand." - Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960)

"Classes struggle, some triumph, others are eliminated - such is the history of civilization for thousands of years." - Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976)

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.... We do not want war, but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun." - Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976)

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet." - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"Ideas are peaceful, history is violent." - 2014 film "Fury"

"Much of the history we teach was made by the people we taught." - Motto of West Point Military Academy

"Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge." - George Smith Patton Jr. (1885-1945)

"War would end if the dead could return." - Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947)

"Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds." - Luis Bunuel (1900-83)

"This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us the pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we need, or provide us with the heroes, the presidents and the leaders, the monuments and museums which we erect to them in the name of PEACE." - James Jones (1921-77), The Thin Red Line

"So natural to man is the practice of violence that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility." - Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul." - John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

"History is the narrative of great actions with praise or blame." - Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

"Historians are to be read with moderation and kindness, and it is to be remembered that they can not be in all circumstances like Lynceus." - Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban (1915-2002)

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?" (Howard Roark in The Fountainhead) - Ayn Rand (1906-1982)

"Honest history is the weapon of freedom." - Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

"History does not repeat itself; the historians repeat one another." - Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)

"Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind." - W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

"The doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense." - Crane Brinton (1898-1968)

"What else can history teach us? Only the vanity of believing we can impose our theories on history. Any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual." - Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)

"History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time." - anon.

"History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness." - Will Durant (1885-1981)

"History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil." - Will Durant (1885-1981)

"Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up." - anon.

"Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history." - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"History is the propaganda of the victors." - Ernst Toller (1893-1939)

"The study of history is the playground of patriotism." - George MacKinnon Wrong (1860-1948)

"There is a Law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait." - Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

"People are inexterminable - like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices - that's us." - Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity." - Dexter Perkins (1889-)

"I often think it odd that [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." (Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey) - Jane Austen (1775-1817)

"Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos." - Thomas Andrew Bailey (1902-1983)

"History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are." - Ken Burns (1953-)

"Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"[History] is a closeout sale of new and old public myths." - Anton Kaes

"People think too historically; they are always living half in a cemetery." - Aristide Briand (1862-1932)

"Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"History is a pageant and not a philosophy." - Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)

"The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him." - Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895)

"History, like thermodynamics, won't let you out." - Ira Haron

"A small sample of the oxygen molecules from any breath that anybody took within the past few thousand years is near certain to be in the next breath you take." - David Bodanis

"There will always be a connection between the way in which men contemplate the past and the way in which they contemplate the present." - Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862)

"For wisdom is the great end of history. It is designed to supply the want of experience." - Hugh Blair (1718-1800)

"Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense." - Goldwin Smith (1823-1910)

"The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"History has thrust something upon me from which I cannot turn away." - Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"History does not only consist of documents." - John Lukacs (1924-)

"Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history." - A.S. Byatt (1936-)

"The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men." - Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), A Room of One's Own

"History is a reconstruction of life in its wholeness, not of the superficial aspects, but of the deeper, inner organic processes." - Jules Michelet (1798-1874)

"History belongs above all to the man who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it." - Paul Horgan (1903-1995)

"History is the new poetry." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology." - Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893)

"History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe." - Jules Romains (1885-1972)

"History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow." - Francis Ponge (1899-1988)

"History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force." - Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963)

"God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me." - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

"What man is, only history tells." - George Lachmann Mosse (1918-1999)

"How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?" - Thomas Cahill (1940-)

"The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity. If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred - different versions of what took place." - David Eddings (1931-) and Leigh Eddings (1937-2007)

"In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal, by the comparison and application of other men's fore-passed miseries with our own like errours and ill-deservings." - Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)

"Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the truth too near the heels it may haply strike out his teeth." - Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)

"Nothing is certain except death and taxes." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"Death destroys a man; the idea of Death saves him." - E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

"Life must go on; I forget just why." - Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" - Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

"Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for." - Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973)

"No people are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people." - Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

"History is a better guide than good intentions." - Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (1926-2006)

"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." - Pres. Harry S. Truman (1884-1972)

"Men make history and not the other way around. In period where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better." - Pres. Harry S. Truman (1884-1972)

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." - James Baldwin (1924-1987)

"The history of the world is the verdict of the world." - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

"History is not life, but since only life makes history, the union of the two is obvious." - Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1865-1941)

"History must stay open, it is all humanity." - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

"There is no inevitability in history except as men make it." - Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965)

"Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions." - Carolyn Heilbrun (1926-2003)

"There's no time like the present." - Mary Manley (1663-1724)

"History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance." - R. Jackson Wilson

"There are two ways to slice easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything." - Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950)

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the Party is always right." - George Orwell (1903-1950)

"The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened." - Peter Ludwig Berger (1929-)

"History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality." - Pieter Geyl (1887-1966)

"There is no supreme court of history." - James Garfield Randall (1881-1953)

"One must overcome history by dogma." - Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892)

"We study history in order to intervene in the course of history." - Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930)

"Contemporary history is the least valuable of all kinds. The relative importance of events and persons cannot be fairly estimated till time has tested them and shown which is great and which is small." - S.O. McConnell

"One ceases to be lonely only in recollection; perhaps that is why people read history." - John Andrew Rice (1888-1968)

"How the purer spirit is united to his clod, is a knot too hard for fallen humanity to untie." - Joseph Glavnill (1636-80)

"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings." - Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages... The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages... It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races... The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar." - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." - Marcus Garvey (1887-1940)

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." - Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God's gift, that's why we call it the present." - Various

"We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre." - Dick Gregory (1932-)

"Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey." - Mason Cooley (1927-2002)

"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are." - David McCullough (1933-)

"Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always." - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope." - Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968)

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"What the craze for myth represents most of all is the fear of history." - Philip Rahv (1908-1973)

"To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity." - Roy P. Basler

"The Universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." - Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"Every generation demands that history shall be rewritten. This is not alone because it requires that the work should be adapted to its own point of view, but because it is instinctively seeking those lines which connect the problems and lessons of the past with its own questions and circumstances. If it were not for the existence of lines of this kind, history might be entertaining, but would have little real value." - John Austin Stevens (1827-1910)

"Do not applaud me. It is not I who speaks to you, but history which speaks through my mouth." - Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)

"History is no easy science; its subject, human society, is inifinitely complex." - Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)

"Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the truth too near the heels it may haply strike out his teeth." - Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)

"The past is always a rebuke to the present." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"History thus returns forever - as film." - Anton Kaes

"History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect... History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything." - Paul Valery (1875-1945)

"History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious." - Paul Valery (1875-1945), Regards sur le Monde Actuel

"The history of states and nations has provided some income for historiographers and book dealers, but I know no other purpose it may have served." - Karl Ludwig Borne (1786-1837)

"Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

"History, history! We fools, what do we know or care." - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

"A country without a memory is a country of madmen." - George Santayana (1863-1952)

"History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning." - Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

"History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose." - Sir John Harold Plumb (1911-2001)

"[History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"History is a science, no more and no less." (1903) - J.B. Bury (1861-1927)

"I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars." - J.M. Bury (1861-1927)

"History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies." - Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)

"[History is] the most difficult of all the sciences." - Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)

"History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened." - Earnest Albert Hooten (1887-1954)

"Writing intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to the wall." - William Best Hesseltine (1902-63)

"To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings. - Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

"With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present." - Kenneth Milton Stampp (1912-)

"History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"History is ultimately more important than its signers." - Edward Michael Harrington (1928-1989)

"History attempts to provide society with an artificial collective memory." - Mark M. Krug

"A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized." - Mark M. Krug

"History is the memory of things said and done." - Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945)

"Nothing capable of being memorized is history." - R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943)

"Nothing falsifies history more than logic." - Francois Guizot (1787-1874)

"History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history." - Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)

"The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts." - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten." - George Santayana (1863-1952)

"The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do." - Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)

"History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"History is not narration, as Thierry thought, nor analysis, as Guizot thought, it is resurrection." - Jules Michelet (1798-1874)

"The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their place is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present." - David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country

"History, facts and truth are all divine products, and must prevail." - Charles Augustus Briggs (1841-1913)

"The past has always been the handmaid of authority." - Sir John Harold Plumb (1911-2001)

"History is no more than memories refreshed." - Peter Charles Newman (1929-)

"A new future requires a new past." - Eric Foner (1943-)

"History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage, and its perpetual commemoration." - Norman Oliver Brown (1913-2002)

"In fact history does not belong to us, but we belong to it." - Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)

"A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it. But a citizen with a fixed place in the community wants to acquire a glorious past just as he acquires antique furniture. By that past he is reassured of his present importance; in it he finds strength to face the dangers that lie in front of him." - Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989)

"For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual." - Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

"We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened." - Thomas Frederick Tout (1855-1929)

"History is for human self-knowledge... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man had done and thus what man is." - R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943)

"A society in stable equilibrium is by definition one that has no history and wants no historians." - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

"When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian." - Shailer Mathews (1863-1941)

"History paints the human heart." - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature." - Henry James (1843-1916), Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other will be the one with the best memory." - Henry James (1843-1916)

"History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935)

"The researches of many eminent antiquarians have already thrown much darkness on the subject; and it is possible, if they continue their labors, that we shall soon know nothing at all." - Artemus Ward (1834-1867)

"That generations of historians have resorted to what might be called 'proof by haphazard quotation' does not make the procedure valid or reliable; it only makes it traditional." - Lee Benson

"The past does not influence me; I influence it." - Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

"History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same." - Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903-1997)

"History should rescue past lost causes from oblivion." - anon.

"I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past - can't be restored." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"History is the distillation of rumour." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"It is the essence of the poor that they do not appear in history." - anon.

"As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end and without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my history, asking for a round century before going further." - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

"Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics." - Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947)

"Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history." - Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

"In mass societies, myth takes the place of history." - William John Bossenbrook (1897-1968)

"It takes three facts to make a truth." - Eugene Manlove Rhodes (1869-1934)

"History is not a science, it is a method." - Charles Seignobos (1854-1942)

"It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future." - Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906)

"History is still in large measure poetry to me." - Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897)

"History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes." - Randolph S. Bourne (1886-1918)

"History in our kind of society is not a luxury but a necessity. - Patrick D. Hazard

"In its amplest meaning history includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth." - James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936)

"What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it." - Thomas Pynchon (1937-)

"History without politics descends to mere literature." - Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-1895)

"History is past politics, and politics present hitory." - Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-1895)

"History is the school of statesmanship." - Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-1895)

"Binary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived." - Ira Berlin (1941-)

"In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined." - Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)

"To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen)." - Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)

"History is no criminal court" - Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)

"History has a way of censoring contemporary values." - anon.

"Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more." - Geoffrey Barraclough (1908-1984)

"While the mediocre European is obsessed with history, the mediocre American is ignorant of it." - anon.

"History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life." - Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

"Everyone falsifies history even if it is only his own personal history. Sometimes the falsification is deliberate, sometimes unconscious, but always the past is altered to suit the needs of the present. The best we can say of any account is not that it is the real truth at last, but that this is how the story appears now." - Joseph Freeman (1897-1965)

"He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!" - Gottfried Benn (1886-1956)

"Historians fall into one of three categories: those who lie, those who are mistaken, and those who do not know." - anon.

"The course of history reflects a continual contest between limited, orderly processes of development and historical accident." - Cord Meyer (1920-2001)

"Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or culture also becomes a dead people." - Malcolm X (1925-1965)

"There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death." - Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

"If history teaches anything about the causes of revolution - and history does not teach much but still teaches considerably more than social science theories - it is that a disintegration of political systems precedes revolutions, that the telling symptom of disintegration is a progressive erosion of governmental authority, and that this erosion is caused by the government's inability to function properly, from which spring the citizens' doubts about its legitimacy." - Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

"History is not a work of philosophy, it is a painting; it is necessary to combine narration with the representation of the subject, that is, it is necessary simultaneously to design and to paint; it is necessary to give to men the language and the sentiments of their times, not to regard the past in the light of our own opinion." - Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)

"History is neither written nor made without love or hate." - Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)

"A page of history is worth a volume of logic." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935)

"I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past." - Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)

"Happy people have no history." - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

"Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history." - Albert Camus (1913-1960)

"You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is." - William Faulkner (1897-1962)

"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which has been the glory of his past." - William Faulkner (1897-1962)

"There is properly no history, only biography." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"[History is] not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments." - Geoffrey Barraclough (1908-1984)

"History itself touches only a small part of a nation's life. Most of the activities and sufferings of the people... have been and will remain without written record." - E.L. Woodward

"To look back upon history is inevitably to distort it." - Norman Pearson

"[History is] petrified imagination." - Arthur Baer

"Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple." - David Shannon

"The moralist must praise heroism and condemn cruelty; but the moralist does not explain events." - Georges Lefebvre (1874-1959)

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." - Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

"The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation." - John Hope Franklin (1915-2009)

"History would be an impossible area of human reflection if there were no recurrent attributes of human nature." - Willson H. Coates (-1976)

"But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding." - Marc Bloch (1886-1944)

"The mania for judgments" is a "satanic enemy of true history". - Marc Bloch (1886-1944)

"History is the name we as human beings give to the horizon of consciousness within which we live." - Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. (1929-)

"The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity." - Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)

"Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature." - David Hume (1711-1776)

"It is not man's evolution but his attainment that is the greatest lesson of the past and the highest theme of history." - George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)

"History has now been for the first time systematically considered, and has been found, like other phenomena, subject to invariable laws." - Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

"If history is a collection of events which come to life for us because of what some actors did, some recorders recorded, and some previewers decided to retell, a clinician attempting to interpret an historical event must first of all get the facts straight." - Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

"History, by appraising... of the past, will enable them to judge of the future." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"History, in general, only informs us what bad government is." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality, that it does not exist." - Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-97)

"History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary." - Lynn Townsend White Jr. (1907-87)

"The historian lays humanity on the couch." - Lynn Townsend White Jr. (1907-87)

"Once historians wrote to instruct men in right examples and warn against evil ones. Now wiser in their generation they write to instruct other historians in true methodology and to warn against false ones." - Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 1966

"I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out." - Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

"It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also." - Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

"The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies." - James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838-1922)

"The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history." - Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

"Knowledge of the past has come down through one or more human minds, has been processed by them, and therefore cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter." - Sir George Norman Clark (1890-1979)

"No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error." - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

"History is the shank of the social sciences." - Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962)

"No historian should be trusted implicitly." - George Kitson Clark (1900-75)

"In a certain sense all men are historians." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"The past is never dead; it's not even past." (Gavin Stevens) - William Faulkner (1897-1962)

"Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him." - Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)

"History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern." - Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-1997)

"The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material." - Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-1997)

"Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history." - Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-1997)

"Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written." - Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-1997)

"Half the job in teaching history is in getting the students interested in the questions the professor deems important." - Sidney E. Mead (1905-1994)

"History is only a catalogue of the forgotten." - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

"[History is] a graveyard of aristocracies." - Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923)

"[History is] the doubtful story of successive events." - Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923)

"If history teaches any lesson at all, it is that there are no historical lessons." - Lucien Febvre (1878-1956)

"History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"History thus becomes largely a study of character. Insight into temperament is hardly less important than the probing of original materials." - Charles Francis Adams Jr. (1835-1915)

"At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself." - E.P. Thompson (1924-1993)

"The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future." - Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

"I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that give me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown." - Cherie Lunghi (1952-)

"It is clear that history differs from the other disciplines in having an approach and not an area of its own." - Leonard Krieger (1918-1990)

"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

"History, in a democratic age, tends to become a series of popular apologies, and is inclined to assume that the people can do no wrong." - A.F. Pollard (1869-1948)

"The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease." - Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

"History is that which has happened and that which goes on happening in time. But also it is the stratified record upon which we set our feet, the ground beneath us; and the deeper the roots of our being go down into the layers that lie below and beyond the... confines of our ego, yet at the same time feed and condition it... the heavier is our life with thought and the weightier is the soul of our flesh." - Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

"We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer." - Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

"Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order, pattern and possibly purpose." - Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1921-94)

"I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time." - Paul Valery (1875-1945)

"Skepticism is history's bedfellow." - Edgar Saltus (1855-1921)

"Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me." - Albert Camus (1913-1960)

"History... may be regarded as an artificial extension and broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations." - James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936)

"To become historically-minded is to be grown-up." - James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936)

"Happy is the country that has no history." - anon.

"What man is, only his history tells." - Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

"In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"What mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it history." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind." - R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943)

"Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics." - Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-1895)

"That which is past and gone is irrevocable. Wise men have enough to do with the present and things to come." - Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"The things that we know about the past may be divided into those which probably never happened, or those which do not much matter." - "Dean" William Ralph Inge (1860-1954)

"After the collection of facts, the search for causes." - Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893)

"Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word." - Peter Gay (1923-2015)

"So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens." - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

"History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical." - Marc Bloch (1886-1944)

"Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

"[History is] a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss." - W. Stull Holt (1896-1981)

"But we may want to keep in mind that deeds and words are not as distinguishable as often we presume. History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands." - Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012)

"Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences." - Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012)

"History is the systematic exposition, free from all unrelated purpose, of facts irrespective of their nature, methodically acquired, through which human activity manifested itself, irrespective of place and time." - Nicolae Iorga (1874-1940)

"History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. The history of man's ideas is nothing more than the chronicle of human error." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"Pour faire de l'histoire, il faut savoir compter." - Georges Lefebvre (1874-1959)

"Problems cannot all be solved, for, as they are solved, new aspects are continually revealed: the historian opens the way, he does not close it." - Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963)

"Writing history is a perpetual exercise in judgment." - Cushing Strout

"What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization." - Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982)

"History furnishes to politics all the arguments that it needs for the chosen cause." - Romain Rolland (1866-1944)

"History is and should be a science." - Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)

"Voltaire to the contrary, history is a bag of tricks which the dead have played upon historians." - Lynn Townsend White Jr. (1907-87)

"History within itself cannot be transcended... In history itself there are only relative victories." - Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923)

"The value of history... is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." - R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943)

"History is a means of access to ourselves." - Lynn Townsend White Jr. (1907-87)

"History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form." - Johan Huizinga (1872-1945)

"In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"History is full of delightful reversals, where the opposite of what one predicts comes true." - Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922-)

"Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections." - Johan Huizinga (1872-1945)

"Let the science and research of the historian find the fact and let his imagination and art make clear its significance." - Sir George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)

"In history there are no real beginnings." - Warren Sylvester Smith (1912-)

"The past in the hands of historians is not what it was." - Lynn Townsend White Jr. (1907-87)

"Let the science and research of the historian find the fact and let his imagination and art make clear its significance." - Sir George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)

"Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves." - Sir George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)

"My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water." - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past." - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"[History is] an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs." - Gordon S. Wood (1933-)

"The record - history - exists only in the media, and the people who make the media, make history." - James Monaco

"My country has no history, only a past." - Alden Albert Nowlan (1933-1983)

"If one has an exaggerated view of the past, then one is obviously going to have a diminished view of the present." - Joseph S. Nye Jr. (1937-)

"History is the projection of ideology into the past." - Sir John Keegan (1934-)

"A historian has many duties. The first is not to slander; the second is not to bore." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"As the primary end of history is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an historian." - Hugh Blair (1718-1800)

"History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought." - Etienne Gilson (1884-1978)

"History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor." - Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945)

"History is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art." - Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884)

"The historian must have... some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead." - E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

"History at its best is vicarious experience." - Edmund Sears Morgan (1916-2013)

"Every day grows more amnesiac about its recent past." - Hilton Kramer (1928-)

"History is the great propagator of doubt." - A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990)

"Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present." - Paul Fussell (1924-)

"History, in brief, is an analysis of the past in order that we may understand the present and guide our conduct into the future." - Sidney E. Mead (1904-1999)

"History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such." - Henry Lewis Stimson (1867-1950)

"History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time." - Henry Valentine Miller (1891-1980)

, Plexus (1963)

"The historian amputates reality." - Gaetano Salvemini (1873-1957)

"History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies." - Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963)

"Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future." - George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)

"Historians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous." - Robert Stinson (1941-)

"If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river, and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future." - Lord John Acton (1834-1902)

"History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit." - Fustel de Coulange (1830-1889)

"All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out." - A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990)

"Too many so-called historians are really 'hysterians'; their thinking is more visceral than cerebral. When their duties as citizens clash with their responsibilities as scholars, Clio frequently takes a back seat." - Thomas A. Bailey (1902-1983)

"Well-behaved women seldom make history." - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1938-)

"That is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist." - Jacques Barzun (1907-)

"Without philosophy, history seems to me to be deaf and dumb." - Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)

"All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology." - George Bradford Caird (1917-1984)

"Life is a kind of chess." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"It's a great huge game of chess that's being played all over the world." (Alice in Through the Looking-Glass) - Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

"Swindon: 'What will history say?' Burgoyne: 'History, sir, will tell lies as usual.'" - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), The Devil's Disciple

"History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside." - Pres. John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1918-1963)

"The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle." - Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), The True Believer (1951)

"When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious." - Anatole France (1844-1924)

"For the rubble of history, which is undigested and therefore goes on blindly, does not lie so thickly on the ground as in our own consciousness." - Herbert Luethy (Lüthy) (1918-2002)

"In studying history we are finding out about ourselves, and in the last resort the natural sciences and even mathematics have the same final end." - Vivian Hunter Galbraith (1889-1976)

"If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history, the three of them together." - Theodore Harold White (1915-1986)

"Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history." - Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes (1882-1964)

"We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are." - Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)

"God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913)

"If there is no God, then everything is permissible." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

"You can say anything about world history... except one thing... It cannot be said that world history is reasonable." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

, Notes from Underground (1864)

"The Devil's best trick is to convince you he doesn't exist." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867)

"I need to know if she [Sarah Palin] thinks dinosaurs were here four thousand years ago... because she's going to have the nuclear code." - Matt Damon (1970-)

"To many of the modern generations, history, like God, is dead." - Derek Heather

"It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence." - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

"The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." - Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins (1941-)

"At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." - Robert Jastrow (1925-2008)

"Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out." - Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." - Woody Allen (1935-)

"Life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death." - George Carlin (1937-2008)

"The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor." - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality." - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition... these are the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society so far has produced the best fruit." - Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." - L.P. Hartley (1895-1972)

"It is impossible to write ancient history because we lack source materials, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many." - Charles Peguy (1873-1914)

"Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman." - George Santayana (1863-1952)

"Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice." - Will Durant (1885-1981)

"The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding." - Will Durant (1885-1981) and Ariel Durant (1898-1981), The Reformation

"History is a bath of blood." - William James (1842-1910), Memories and Studies

"History... is an aggregation of truths, half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip, and official prevarications. It is a canvas upon which thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed their conceptions and interpretations of a day and an era. Some motifs are grotesque and some are magnificent." - Philip D. Jordan

"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river." - Will Durant (1881-1981)

"Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery" - Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970)

"A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life." - Allen Johnson (1870-1931), The Historian and Historical Evidence

"Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections." - Johan Huizinga (1874-1945)

"I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself." - William Butler Yeats (1839-1922)

"History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of history becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth." - Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

"The West has never been all of the world that matters. The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West." - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), The World and the West, 1953

"Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two." - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)

"The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history." - Will Durant (1885-1981) and Ariel Durant (1898-1981)

"We have now won two world-wars, neither of which concerned us, we were slipped in. We have levelled the powers of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble and dependence. We have won two wars and a third is coming. This one will not be so easy. We were at ease while the powers of the world were split into factions: we've changed that. We have enjoyed fine dreams; we have dreamed of unifying the world; we are unifying it - against us. Two wars, and they breed a third. Now guard the beeches, watch the north, trust not the dawns. Probe every cloud. Build power. Fortress America may yet for a long time stand, between the east and the west, like Byzantium." - Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils." - Jacques Barzun (1907-)

"History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another." - Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897)

"History is concerned primarily with human phenomena, not with natural; and history is doubly human because, as an idea, it is man's creation, challenging him to transcend the limits of information about himself and to discover what he is by finding meaning in what he has done. In short, it is man's commentary on man." - John Barker

"If the novel can go to history, history can go to the novel, at least to the extent of bringing a creative imagination to bear upon its characters... History, which reconciles incompatibles, and balances probabilities, by its very nature eventually reaches the reality of fiction. And that is the highest reality of all." - George Dangerfield (1904-86)

"When codes, when religions, when ideas cease to move forward, it is always in some shining illusion that an alarmed humanity attempts to take refuge." - George Dangerfield (1904-86)

"The present top-priority world problem to be solved may be summarized as how to triple, swiftly, safely, and satisfyingly, the overall performances per kilos, kilowatts, and man-hours of the world's comprehensively invested resources of elements, energy, time, and intelligence. To do so will render those resources - which at the present uncoordinated, happenstance, design level can support only 44 per cent of humanity - capable of supporting 100 per cent of humanity's increasing population at higher standards of living than any human minority or single individual has ever known or dreamed of and will thus eliminate the cause of war and its weapons' frustrating diversion of productivity from the support of all mankind."- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity

"And the seasons they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on the carousel of Time, and we can't return we can only look behind from where we came, and go round and round and round in the circle game." - Joni Mitchell (1943-)

"History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass." - Frederic Harrison (1831-1923)

"Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them." - Guy Fregault (1918-1977), La Guerre de la Conquete

"History, in the end, becomes a form of irony." - Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"- John Leonard (1939-)

"History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral, but forced to enlist in every army." - Allan Nevins (1890-1971)

[H]istory is the sextant of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position." - Allan Nevins (1890-1971), The Gateway to History

"The writing of histories, as Goethe once noted, is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past... The writing of history liberates us from history." - Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), History as the Story of Liberty

"History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat." - Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919)

"History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another." - Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947)

"History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances." - Donald Creighton (1902-1979)

"History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil." - Joseph Heller (1923-1999), Good as Gold, 1979

"The history of the world shows that when a mean thing was done, man did it; when a good thing was done, man did it." - Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)

"The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian." - B.H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970)

"I see history as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man." - Romain Gary (1914-80)

"For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado." - Mary McCarthy (1912-1989)

"The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard." - Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989)

"The stars are dead. The animals will not look./ We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and/ History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon." - W.H. Auden (1907-1973), Spain (1937)

"Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals." - John Dewey (1859-1952)

"[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living." - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

"The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history." - Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)

"History is the synthesis of all social sciences turned towards the past." - Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929-)

"History is the discipline closest to life; and life is rarely free of contradictions."- Karl Joachim Weintraub (1924-2004)

"Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else." - Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979)

"If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance." - Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979)

""It is hazardous to speak of the emergence of anything that is absolutely new in history. We ought on occasion to remind ourselves of the fact that there never was a time when man might not know how to put two and two together." - Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979)

"Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present." - Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979)

"[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges." - Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979)

"A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars." - Umberto Eco (1932-)

"History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all." - Fernand Braudel (1902-1985)

"Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way." - Richard Ellmann (1918-1987)

"Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen." - Dame Rebecca West (1892-1983)

"We are all citizens of history." - Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999)

"It must certainly be more dangerous to live in ignorance than to live with knowledge." - Frank Herbert (1920-1986), The White Plague, 1982

"You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can't make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it... Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace." - Frank McCourt (1930-), Angela's Ashes, 1996

"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree." - Michael Crichton (1942-2008), Timeline, 1999

"The view, expressed nowadays by far too many educators, [is] that history is a boring and antiquarian diversion, that we should let bygones be bygones, free ourselves from a dismal and oppressive past, and concentrate on a fresh and better future. I have long and fervently believed that a consciousness of history is one of the key factors that distinguishes us from all other animals - I mean the ability to transcend an illusory sense of NOW, of an eternal present, and to strive for an understanding of the forces and events that made us what we are. Such an understanding is the prerequisite, I believe, for all human freedom." - David Brion Davis (1927-)

"'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read." - Albert Bushnell Hart (1854-1943)

"The future is won by those who coin concepts and interpret the past." - Michael Sturmer (Stürmer) (1938-)

"History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it." - Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-)

"I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there are others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day." - Iggy Pop (1947-)

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses

"Time was invented by Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance." - Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947)

"How long a time lies in one little word!" - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Richard II, Act 1, Scene 3

"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"Each generation brings a clean slate into the world, but the world itself is not a clean slate, and what happened before needs to be learned and remembered." - The New Yorker, 4-15-1985

"People and states oscillate between peace and war, freedom and slavery, order and disorder. They tire easily. Even happiness soon grows wearisome. No sooner do they begin to enjoy the benefits of wise and just government than they demand more wisdom and a different kind of justice. Factions spring up. Everyone is on the lookout for new privileges. The equilibrium that was so hard to strike crumbles. Wild hopes are embraced. The system collapses. Everything has to be built up anew on the ruins of the past." - Jean D'Ormesson, The Glory of the Empire (1971)

"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present." - Golda Meir (1898-1978)

"The human mind is capable of infinite self-deception." - Charles Lee Smith (1887-1964)

"To Theists, the Universe proves the existence of God. To Atheists, the only thing the Universe proves is the Universe." - James Hervey Johnson (1901-1988)

"The Simidae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and the Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded." - Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)

"On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time." - Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving... his origin, growth, hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms... no fire, heroism, intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. All the labours of the ages, the devotion, the inspiration, the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of our solar system, and the temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970

"History records the names of royal bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat." - Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915)

"For our history to be a source of encouragement we have to know our history. The story that we tell ourselves about our history and our time matters. Because our hopes and efforts for building a better future are inextricably linked to our perception of the past it is important to understand and communicate the global development up to now... Freedom is impossible without faith in free people. And if we are not aware of our history and falsely believe the opposite of what is true we risk losing faith in each other." - Max Roser

"History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong." - Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)

"You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contageious and hope can take on a life of its own." - First Lady Michelle Obama (1964-)

"But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past - or more accurately, pastness - is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past." - Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012)

"Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets." - Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour (1848-1930)

"We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have allowed into its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason to let us understand that it is false." - Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

"Life is a partial, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states." - John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971)

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." - Graham Greene (1904-91), The Third Man, 1949

"No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us." - John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)

"Who ordered the muon?" - Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898-1988)

"O Earth, unhappy planet born to die,/ Might I your scribe and your confessor be,/ What wonders must you not relate to me/ Of man, who when his destiny was high/ Strode like the sun into the middle sky/ And shone an hour, and who so bright a he,/ And like the sun went down into the sea,/ Leaving no spark to be remembered by." - Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

"History is the sum total of what we shouldn't have done." - Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967)

"He who puts his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed." - Lech Walesa (1943-)

"History is the method we've evolved for organising our ignorance of the past.. the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them." - Dame Hilary Mary Mantel (1952-)

"Never make predictions, especially about the future." - Yogi Berra (1925-2015)

"Somewhere the Sky touches the Earth, and the name of that place is the End." - African proverb

"This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.'" - Haruki Murakami (1949-)

"Mad from life's history,/ Glad to death's mystery,/ Swift to be hurl'd -/ Anywhere, anywhere,/ Out of this world!" - Thomas Hood (1799-1845), The Bridge of Sighs, 1844

"In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians, for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side." - George Graham Vest (1830-1904)

"For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish my purpose'... I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it." - Isaiah 46:9-11

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light." - Genesis 1:1-3

"Let us make man in our image." - Genesis 1:26

"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." - Genesis 1:31

"But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing what is good and what is bad on your own.'" - Genesis 3:4-5

"You are of your father the Devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." - Jesus Christ (John 8:44)

"And the Lord said, 'What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground'." - Genesis 4:10

"The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the Earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the Earth, and it grieved him to his heart... But one man, Noah, found favor in his eyes." - Genesis 6:5-8

"Then Noah built an altar to the Lord... and offered burnt offerings. And the mighty pleased Lord said in his heart, 'I will never again curse the ground because of man... neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the Earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.'" - Genesis 8:20-22

"God did not create the Earth a chaos, simply for nothing, but formed it to be inhabited." - Isaiah 45:18

"God set the Earth on its foundations so that it should never be shaken." - Psalms 104:5

"Nimrod was the first on Earth to be a mighty man, a mighty hunter before the Lord." - Gen 10:9

"Man has dominated man to his injury." - Ecclesiastes 8:9

"For the love of money is the root of all evil." - St. Paul, 1 Timothy 6:10

"For even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness." - St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 11:14-15

"Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is full grown brings forth death." - St. James 1:13-15

"For the living know that they will die, but the dead are conscious of nothing at all, and they have no more reward. Their memories are lost; their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and they have no more forever any share in all that is done under the Sun." - Ecclesiastes 9:4-6

"Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." - Psalms 127:1

"The righteous shall possess the Earth, and dwell upon it forever." - Psalms 37:29

"Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." - St. Paul, Romans 1:24-25

"Blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life... Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and every one who loves and practices falsehood." - Revelation 22:14-15

"The face of the Lord is against evildoers, to cut off the remembrance of them from the Earth." - Psalms 34:16

"Scoffers will come in the last days, following their own passions and asking, 'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of Creation'. But they deliberately ignore the fact that by the word of God heavens existed long ago, and the Earth was formed out of and by means of water, through which the world that then existed was deluged and perished. But by the same word the heavens and Earth that now exist have been stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men." - St. Peter II 3:3-7

"And God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." - Revelation 21:3-4

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. And the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end." - Isaiah 9:6-7

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them." - Isaiah 11:6

"For the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." - Isaiah 11:9

"Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense, to repay every one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." - Revelation 22:12-13

"You have heard that antichrist is coming." - 1 John 2:18

"I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and Earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to babes." - Jesus Christ, Matthew 11:25

"The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'." - Psalms 14:1

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse. For although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools." - St. Paul, Romans 1:18-22

"The God who made the world and every thing in it, being Lord of Heaven and Earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the Earth, having determined allotted periods, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet, he is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of men. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead." - St. Paul, Acts 17:24-31

"For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart'. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe... For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." - St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

"With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forebearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the Earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up." - St. Peter II 3:8-10

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