quotations about history
What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Observer, Sep. 22, 1957
People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Gods Themselves
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood--read the speeches of Mussolini--at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
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
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
MAYA ANGELOU
On the Pulse of the Morning
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present -- the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject.
DANA ARNOLD
Reading Architectural History
History does not belong to us, we belong to it.
HANS-GEORGE GADAMER
Truth and Method
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
History is the same thing over and over again.
WOODY ALLEN
interview, Der Spiegel, Jun. 20, 2005
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.
HERMANN HESSE
The Glass Bead Game
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
History is philosophy teaching by examples.
THUCYDIDES
The History of the Peloponnesian War
What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.
JANE ADDAMS
address to the Union League Club of Chicago, Feb. 23, 1903
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
History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Esquire, Jan. 2003