HISTORY QUOTES V

quotations about history

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

JULIAN BARNES

The Sense of an Ending

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History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.

CAROL TAVRIS & ELLIOT ARONSON

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)


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

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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There are singular moments in history, dates that divide all that goes before from all that comes after.

GEORGE H. W. BUSH

State of the Union Address, Jan. 31, 1990

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Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H.G. WELLS

The Outline of History

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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs -- the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

The Legacy of the Civil War

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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


Sometimes ... history needs a push.

VLADIMIR LENIN

attributed, Seeds of Revolution: A Collection of Axioms


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

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History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been.

JOSEPH STALIN

radio address, July 3, 1941


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

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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

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Good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

preface, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988


History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

JOHN UPDIKE

Rabbit is Rich

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History, again, tells us of successive civilizations which have been born, have for a space thriven exceedingly, and have then miserably perished.

ARTHUR BALFOUR

Essays and Addresses

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Myths ... collected like barnacles on history, obscuring the truth.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Harkonnen

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Each day is a little bit of history.

JOSé SARAMAGO

Baltasar and Blimunda

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All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

ANNE BRONTE

Agnes Grey

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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

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History is not fable agreed upon, but truth disagreed upon.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts

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