quotations about history
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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 gets written by the winners.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Lost Souls
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
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
The great historian is he that can distinguish what is done from what happens.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
What are our pretended histories? Fables, jest-books, satires, apologies, anything but what they profess to be.
A. H. EVERETT
attributed, Day's Collacon
What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on the principles deduced from it.
G.W.F. HEGEL
Philosophy of History
Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Literary Influence of Academies", Essays in Criticism
There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
History is written by the winners.
ALEX HALEY
attributed, And I Quote
Any true student must realize that History has no beginning. Regardless of where a story starts, there are always earlier heroes and earlier tragedies.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, 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. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed Providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality and to delectation. And therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man's nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
History is the autobiography of a madman.
ALEXANDER HERZEN
Dr. Krupov
Old men can make war, but it is children who will make history.
RAY MERRITT
Full of Grace
Faithful, well-written history is a map, in which we trace the winding ways and manifold wonders of divine Providence.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Light of Other Days
The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mandell Creighton, Apr. 5, 1887