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Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.
Cooley, Mason

History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases.
Stubbs, William

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
Carlyle, Thomas

The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive.
Morley, John

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.
Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Historian: A broad-gauge gossip.
Bierce, Ambrose

History does not unfold: it piles up.
Adams, Robert

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.
Bacon, Francis

Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And, speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik, if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be.
O'Rourke, P.J.

History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.
Holt, W. Stull

History is a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
Williams, William Carlos

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
Gregory, Dick

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.
Angoff, Charles

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
Irving, Washington

History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Bierce, Ambrose

History is a vast early warning system.
Cousins, Norman

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
Carlyle, Thomas

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
Acton, John

The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers, out of the irreconcilable opinions of men.
Fussner, F. Smith

History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow.
Ponge, Francis

History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
Voltaire

A mere compilation of facts presents only the skeleton of History; we do but little for her if we cannot invest her with life, clothe her in the habiliments of her day, and enable her to call forth the sympathies of succeeding generations.
Lee, Hannah Farnham

The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?
Anthony, Katharine

History is politics projected into the past.
Pokrovsky, M.N.

The obscurest epoch is today.
Stevenson, Robert Louis

History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others.
Voltaire

We proceed out of history into history again.
Alexander, Sidney

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?
Warren, Robert Penn

The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.
Salvemini, Gaetano

The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him.
Sybel, Heinrich von

Skepticism is history's bedfellow.
Saltus, Edgar

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel

History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
Acton, John

It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.
Muller, Herbert J.

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.
Adams, John

Historians are gossips who tease the dead.
Voltaire

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.
Romains, Jules

Unlike poetry and music, the art of history is cumulative.
Clive, John

Thrift was never more necessary in the world's history than it is today.
Sisson, Francis H.

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.
Butterfield, Herbert

In a certain sense all men are historians.
Carlyle, Thomas

History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.
Adenauer, Konrad

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
Auden, W.H.

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Will and Ariel Durant

History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
McCullough, David

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.
Raleigh, Walter