quotations about history
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
MAYA ANGELOU
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On the Pulse of the Morning
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Now, history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals. Abstractions advance only when borne forward by real men.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
TRACY K. SMITH
"Sci-Fi"
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present -- the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject.
DANA ARNOLD
Reading Architectural History
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Gods Themselves
The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood--read the speeches of Mussolini--at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.
CHRIS ABANI
The Secret History of Las Vegas
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
History is philosophy teaching by examples.
THUCYDIDES
The History of the Peloponnesian War
What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on the principles deduced from it.
G.W.F. HEGEL
Philosophy of History
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
What are our pretended histories? Fables, jest-books, satires, apologies, anything but what they profess to be.
A. H. EVERETT
attributed, Day's Collacon
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.
HERMANN HESSE
The Glass Bead Game
The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
The phenomena of history should be so recorded as to aid the reader, and particularly the young reader, in discovering its philosophy, instead of being recorded as they have hitherto generally been, in such a way as to obliterate the better instincts of humanity.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Light of Other Days