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History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.
-Konrad Adenauer
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"James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them."
-James Baldwin
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History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.
-Arthur Balfour
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Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
-Julian Barnes
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The lessons of history? There are four: The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power; the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; when it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
-Charles Austin Beard
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"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away."
-Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus), The Consolation of Philosophy
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"History never repeats itself ,as most people fear. People usually repeat history."
-Divine Chikobvu, STEP ON THE CLOUD
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History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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"History is a vast early warning system."
-Norman Cousins
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We of the twentieth century should not allow ourselves to think vaguely of the Middle Ages as a benighted or shadowy period when life and the people who constituted it had scarcely anything in common with ourselves. In reality the men of the Middle Ages were moved by the same emotions and impulses as our own, and their lives presented the same incongruous mixture of nobility and baseness.
-Robert Huntington Fletcher, A History of English Literature
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History never looks like history when you are living through it.
-John W. Gardner
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What experience and history teach is this--that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
-G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History
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"Elphaba, where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it--- history."
-Winnie Holzman, Wicked (the musical, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire)
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History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
-James Joyce, Ulysses, ch. 2, “Nestor,” The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Random House (1986)
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"History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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"We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.
-Arthur Koestler
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History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
-John Le Carré
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My experiences of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor be indisposed to serve them: nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
-General Robert E. Lee, letter to Lt. Colonel Charles Marshall , shortly before Lee's death , quoted in Charles Flood, 'Lee: The Last Years." 1981
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History is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through to avoid.
-Livy
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Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay
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I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
-Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel Lecture
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Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.
-Karl Marx, Letter to Joseph Wedemeyer, March 5, 1852
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History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
-Henry Miller, Plexus, 1949
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"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
-Napoleon
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"You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall."
-Jawaharlal Nehru
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History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
-George Orwell, essay
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"Just because history is written by the victor does not necessarily mean that it is false. Therefore, revisionist history should always be suspect. Better still, all history should be suspect."
-Colonel Brian D. Perry Sr., Suspect History
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There is an awful lot of difference between reading something and actually seeing it, for you can never tell, till you see it, just how big a liar History is.
-Will Rogers
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Don't be misled by History, or any other unreliable source.
-Will Rogers, April 14, 1935
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians.
-George Santayana, The Life of Reason [1905-1906], Volume I, Reason in Common Sense, Chapter 12, 1906
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Not only is the Napoleonic dream stronger today in our imaginations than it has ever been, but one can already feel the slow falling away of moral opprobrium from our memory of Hitler. In another fifty years we may well find ourselves weighed down by a second monstrous dream of pure grandeur to match that of the Emperor. Two men who dared. Two men who were adored. Two men who led with brilliance. Two men who administered fairly and efficiently. Two men who were modest in their own needs but surrounded by lesser beings who profited from their situation and came between the Hero and the people.
-John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, ch. 4 [Macmillan (1992)]
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History, insofar as it accustoms human beings to comprehend the whole of the past and to hasten forward with its conclusions into the far future, conceals the boundaries of birth and death, which enclose the life of the human being so narrowly and oppressively, and with a kind of optical illusion, expands his short existence into endless space, leading the individual imperceptibly over into humanity.
-Friedrich von Schiller
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Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in historia, et omne, quod fuit in historia, deberet esse in intellectu.
"Nothing is in intellect which has not been in history, and everything that was in history should also be in intellect."
-Gustav Spet, Wisdom or Reason, 1917
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“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
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The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.
-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Epilogue, Part II, Chapter 1.
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History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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Books about History
