quotations about history
History is a compendium of uncertainties.
E. P. DAY
Day's Collacon
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
I long for the time when all the human history is taught as one history, because it really is one history.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, Feb. 28, 2013
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
No generation can escape history.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
commencement address at Texas A&M University, May 12, 1989
The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer and iPod.
LAURA PENNY
More Money Than Brains
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 admits no rules, only outcomes.
DAVID MITCHELL
Cloud Atlas
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 can be well written only in a free country.
VOLTAIRE
letter to Frederick the Great
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
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
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
All great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice ... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
KARL MARX
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.
CICERO
The best historian lies like a mirror.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
History, like God, is watching what we do.
BONO
remarks at National Prayer Breakfast, Feb. 2, 2006
I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth.
BOYD K. PACKER
Faithful History
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