quotations about history
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
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The Life of Reason
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
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
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
KARL MARX
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like the shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be constantly changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History, as we know it, would be impossible. It would cease to exist.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
TONI MORRISON
Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998
History repeats itself.
ENGLISH PROVERB
History hath triumphed over time, which beside it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.
WALTER RALEIGH
preface, History of the World
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.
CARL SAGAN
The Demon-Haunted World
History is a struggle between the "old" right that intended to be just and the "new" that promises to be.
REINHARD BENDIX
Truth and Ideology
History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
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
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.
MALCOLM X
Message to the Grass Roots, Nov. 10, 1963
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
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, 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
I don't believe ... that history repeats itself. There is no cycle. History is permanently doing the same thing. Sometimes we don't notice what's going on, that's all--and sometimes we have no choice but to see.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
Blood of Angels
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
VIRGINIA WOOLF