Quotes on history
Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.
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Mason Cooley Quotes
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.
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William Stubbs Quotes
Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive.
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John Morley Quotes
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
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Bill Vaughan Quotes
After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to worry about history.
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Author Unknown Quotes
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
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Edward Gibbon Quotes
And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.
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George Macaulay Trevelyan Quotes
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
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Albert Camus Quotes
The historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.
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Fritz Stern Quotes
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.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes
All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men.
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John Alfred Spender Quotes
A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.
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Robert Penn Warren Quotes
Historian: A broad-gauge gossip.
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Ambrose Bierce Quotes
History does not unfold: it piles up.
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Robert Adams Quotes
To many of the modern generations, history, like God, is dead.
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Derek Heather Quotes
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
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Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes
History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass.
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Frederic Harrison Quotes
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.
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Francis Bacon Quotes
History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
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Henry Miller Quotes
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.
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P.J. O'Rourke Quotes
All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.
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Voltaire Quotes
History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.
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W. Stull Holt Quotes
History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.
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Author Unknown Quotes
The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.
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James A. Garfield Quotes
As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.
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Walt Whitman Quotes
History is a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
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William Carlos Williams Quotes
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.
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Dick Gregory Quotes
The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.
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Michel de Montaigne Quotes
Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.
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Lynn White Quotes
History is the daughter of time.
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Lucien Febvre Quotes
Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.
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Michael Crichton Quotes
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.
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Pieter Geyl Quotes
For the rubble of history, which is undigested and therefore goes on blindly, does not lie so thickly on the ground as in our own consciousness.
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Herbert Lüthy Quotes
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
History begins in novel and ends in essay.
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Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes
History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.
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Charles Angoff Quotes
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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?
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Washington Irving Quotes
History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
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Ambrose Bierce Quotes
History is a vast early warning system.
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Norman Cousins Quotes
Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.
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George Macaulay Trevelyan Quotes
For me there is no greater subject than history. How a man can study it and not be forced to become a philosopher, I cannot tell.
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George E. Wilson Quotes
Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.
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Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort Quotes
The historian lays humanity on the couch.
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Lynn White Quotes
It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
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Will Durant Quotes
In studying history we are finding out about ourselves, and in the last resort the natural sciences and even mathematics have the same final end.
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Vivian Hunter Galbraith Quotes
History is an argument without end.
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Pieter Geyl Quotes
History: a collection of epitaphs.
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Elbert Hubbard Quotes
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
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John Acton Quotes
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
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Alexis de Tocqeville Quotes
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
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Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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George Santayana Quotes
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
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James Baldwin Quotes
Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.
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Richard Ellman Quotes
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.
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F. Smith Fussner Quotes
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.
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Will Durant Quotes
History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow.
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Francis Ponge Quotes
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
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Voltaire Quotes
History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.
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Fustel de Coulange Quotes
History, like thermodynamics, won't let you out.
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Ira Haron Quotes
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.
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Thomas Jefferson Quotes
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.
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Hannah Farnham Lee Quotes
The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?
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Katharine Anthony Quotes
I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.
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Romain Gary Quotes
History is politics projected into the past.
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M.N. Pokrovsky Quotes
The obscurest epoch is today.
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Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.
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Geoffrey Barraclough Quotes
The historian and the detective have much in common.
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Mark M. Krug Quotes
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
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Mary McCarthy Quotes
History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others.
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Voltaire Quotes
We proceed out of history into history again.
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Sidney Alexander Quotes
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
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John W. Gardner Quotes
We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?
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Robert Penn Warren Quotes
The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.
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Gaetano Salvemini Quotes
The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him.
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Heinrich von Sybel Quotes
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
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James Joyce Quotes
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
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Samuel Butler Quotes
History is a novel for which the people is the author.
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Alfred de Vigny Quotes
Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.
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W.H. Auden Quotes
The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.
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Vincent Starrett Quotes
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
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Barbara Tuchman Quotes
History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.
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Elias Canetti Quotes
Skepticism is history's bedfellow.
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Edgar Saltus Quotes
Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.
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Arnold Toynbee Quotes
The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.
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Ted Koppel Quotes
What mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
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John Acton Quotes
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.
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Herbert J. Muller Quotes
The study of history is the playground of patriotism.
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George M. Wrong Quotes
History is the propaganda of the victors.
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Ernst Toller Quotes
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.
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John Adams Quotes
If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
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Pierre Bayle Quotes
What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.
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Voltaire Quotes
Historians are gossips who tease the dead.
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Voltaire Quotes
History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.
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Jules Romains Quotes
Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.
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Thomas A. Bailey Quotes
History is the synthesis of all social sciences turned towards the past.
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Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Quotes
Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
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Walter Savage Landor Quotes
People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery.
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Aristide Briand Quotes
Unlike poetry and music, the art of history is cumulative.
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John Clive Quotes
The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.
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David Thelen Quotes
Thrift was never more necessary in the world's history than it is today.
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Francis H. Sisson Quotes
There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.
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Philip Howard Quotes
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.
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Herbert Butterfield Quotes
History is a great dust heap.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
In a certain sense all men are historians.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.
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Hajo Holborn Quotes
History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.
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Konrad Adenauer Quotes
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
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W.H. Auden Quotes
It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.
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Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
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Will Durant Quotes
History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; priviledging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof.
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Thomas Fuller Quotes
History is, indeed, little more than the register of the 'crimes, follies, and misfortunes' of mankind. But what experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes
A boy who hears a lesson in history ended by the beauty of peace, and how Napoleon brought ruin upon the world and that he should be forever cursed, will not long have much confidence in his teacher. He wants to hear more about the fighting and less about the peace negotiations.
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William Lee Howard Quotes
For what is history, but huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.
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Washington Irving Quotes
Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes.
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Jean Jaures Quotes
This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.
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Samuel Johnson Quotes
History is the story of events, with praise or blame.
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Cotton Mather Quotes
History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.
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Guy de Maupassant Quotes
For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.
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Mary McCarthy Quotes
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
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David McCullough Quotes
History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
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David McCullough Quotes
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.
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Conor Cruise O'Brien Quotes
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
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Plato Quotes
History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force.
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Frederick Maurice Powicke Quotes
Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.
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Walter Raleigh Quotes
History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.
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Walter Rauschenbusch Quotes
As geography without history seemeth a carkasse without motion; so history without geography wandreth as a vagrant without a certaine habitation.
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John Smith Quotes
Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.
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John Terraine Quotes
Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.
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Willis Thornton Quotes
It was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.
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John Toland Quotes
History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.
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Paul Valéry Quotes
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
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Jessamyn West Quotes
It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.
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Rebecca West Quotes
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
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Theodore Harold White Quotes