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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.”

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Author:A. A. Gill
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“Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.”

IfsKnowsHappensPainStrongHistoryEventsSeasonsHarmonyStatementsHistorianLackingRight TimeConvincingSequenceElusiveDealingsNo PainVerify
Book:To Think of Tea!
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“The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.”

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Author:C. V. Wedgwood
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“For if I should not believe all that is written by Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Ghost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; we distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, then what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men only.”

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Book:Hobbes: Leviathan: Revised student edition
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“I am provoked at the contempt which most historians show for humanity in general; one would think by them, that the whole human species consisted but of about a hundred and fifty people, called and dignified (commonly very undeservedly too) by the titles of Emperors, Kings, Popes, Generals, and Ministers.”

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Author:Lord Chesterfield
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“Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.”

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Author:Daniel J. Boorstin
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“Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.”

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Book:Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
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“While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.”

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Book:The judgment of history
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“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

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Book:Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.”

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Author:Errol Morris
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

PastRememberHistoryProgressRepeatsHistorianDoomedYour PastMy PastFutilityInfancyPast And PresentPast PresentPast Present And FutureCondemningAuschwitzHiroshimaForget The PastPast Present FutureConfederateRemembering The PastStages Of LifeLearn From The PastPresent FuturePast MistakesFuture And PresentTimes PastRepeating HistoryHistory Repeats ItselfPast FutureHistory Of LifeInfancy IsPast Present Future LoveRepeated FailureKnowledge Of The PastLessons Of The PastHomestead ActStudying HistoryPerilous Times
Author:George Santayana
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“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

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Author:H. G. Wells
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“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.”

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Book:The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition
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“Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”

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Book:Another Roadside Attraction
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