quotations about history
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
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The Light of Other Days
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
History gets written by the winners.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Lost Souls
History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Esquire, Jan. 2003
History does not belong to us, we belong to it.
HANS-GEORGE GADAMER
Truth and Method
You know you're getting older when you notice that more and more history questions happened in your lifetime!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jul. 3, 1999
History is the same thing over and over again.
WOODY ALLEN
interview, Der Spiegel, Jun. 20, 2005
Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
The historian's duty is to separate the true from the false, the certain from the uncertain, and the doubtful from that which cannot be accepted.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Every historian has described the age in which he happened to write, as the worst, because he has only heard of the wickedness of other times, but has felt and seen that of his own.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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 D. EISENHOWER
Time Magazine, Oct. 6, 1952
Any true student must realize that History has no beginning. Regardless of where a story starts, there are always earlier heroes and earlier tragedies.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
The great historian is he that can distinguish what is done from what happens.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The vividness and force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on things.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, March 15, 1880
Faithful, well-written history is a map, in which we trace the winding ways and manifold wonders of divine Providence.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
The true science of history, for instance, does not yet exist; scarcely do we begin to-day to catch a glimpse of its extremely complicated conditions. But suppose it were definitely developed, what could it give us? It would exhibit a faithful and rational picture of the natural development of the general conditions--material and ideal, economical, political and social, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific--of the societies which have a history. But this universal picture of human civilization, however detailed it might be, would never show anything beyond general and consequently abstract estimates. The milliards of individuals who have furnished the living and suffering materials of this history at once triumphant and dismal--triumphant by its general results, dismal by the immense hecatomb of human victims "crushed under its car"--those milliards of obscure individuals without whom none of the great abstract results of history would have been obtained--and who, bear in mind, have never benefited by any of these results--will find no place, not even the slightest, in our annals. They have lived and been sacrificed, crushed for the good of abstract humanity, that is all.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Last of the Mohicans
History. It has always vaguely interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of previous deaths.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest