HISTORY QUOTES IV

quotations about history

History is only time furnished with dates and rich with events.

RIVAROL

attributed, Day's Collacon


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 history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

GEORGE HENRY LEWES

The Foundations of a Creed


History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

GEORGE ELIOT

Janet's Repentance

Tags: George Eliot


History, like God, is watching what we do.

BONO

remarks at National Prayer Breakfast, Feb. 2, 2006

Tags: Bono


All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

EDWIN H. LAND

address to Polaroid Corporation employees at Symphony Hall in Boston, February 5, 1960


There is a history in all men's lives.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Henry IV, Part II

Tags: William Shakespeare


It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

REBECCA WEST

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Tags: Rebecca West


History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

The Life of Reason

Tags: George Santayana


Half the things you've been taught in school are just convenient fictions. History is a puppet show for childish minds.

JOHN TWELVE HAWKS

The Traveler

Tags: John Twelve Hawks


The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

TONI MORRISON

Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998

Tags: Toni Morrison


History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims

Tags: Edward Counsel


Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

RICHARD NIXON

Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969

Tags: Richard Nixon


He who thoroughly understands the present epoch, must have reproduced, and lived through, in his private experience, all the religions, dispensations, and civilizations that preceded it.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

Remarks on the Science of History

Tags: William Batchelder Greene


The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

The Devils of Loudun

Tags: Aldous Huxley


Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.

TANITH LEE

The Gods are Thirsty


The history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

The Deerslayer

Tags: James Fenimore Cooper


Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

LEWIS H. LAPHAM

Lapham's Quarterly, 2008