quotations about history
The tapestry of history is woven of many threads.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
No generation can escape history.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
commencement address at Texas A&M University, May 12, 1989
He, therefore, that is dead to all the smiles and to all the frowns of the living, alone is equal to the hazardous task of writing a history of his own times, worthy of being transmitted to times that are to come.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
Timeline
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
CICERO
Pro Publio Sestio
History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
History makes haste to record great deeds, but often neglects good ones.
HOSEA BALLOU
attributed, Treasury of Thought
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
The best historian lies like a mirror.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Deerslayer
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
KARL MARX
Die Heilige Familie
History admits no rules, only outcomes.
DAVID MITCHELL
Cloud Atlas
The manner of writing history is as characteristic of the narrator as the actions are of the persons who are related to have performed them; often much more so. It may be generally defined as a view of one age taken by another; a picture of a series of men and women painted by one of another series.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.
CICERO
Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Foundations of a Creed
I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth.
BOYD K. PACKER
Faithful History
History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.
JACOB BURCKHARDT
Judgements on History and Historians
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
MAO ZEDONG
"On Coalition Government", Apr. 24, 1945
Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Blake's Exhibition and Catalogue of 1809, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures: Number V. The Ancient Britons