HISTORY QUOTES V

quotations about history

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

MAO ZEDONG

"On Coalition Government", Apr. 24, 1945


History, again, tells us of successive civilizations which have been born, have for a space thriven exceedingly, and have then miserably perished.

ARTHUR BALFOUR

Essays and Addresses

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History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

preface, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988


History is not fable agreed upon, but truth disagreed upon.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts

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I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

TONI MORRISON

Time interview, Jan. 21, 1998

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The historian's task is to present what actually happened. The more purely and completely he achieves this, the more perfectly has he solved this problem. A simple presentation is at the same time the primary indispensable condition of his work and the highest achievement he will be able to attain. Regarded in this way, he seems to be merely receptive and productive, not active and creative.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

"The Historian's Task"

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The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

RICHARD NIXON

Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969

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History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion

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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

JOHN UPDIKE

Rabbit is Rich

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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs -- the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

The Legacy of the Civil War

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History is a struggle between the "old" right that intended to be just and the "new" that promises to be.

REINHARD BENDIX

Truth and Ideology

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History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

2666

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Each day is a little bit of history.

JOSé SARAMAGO

Baltasar and Blimunda

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There is a history in all men's lives.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Henry IV, Part II

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People are absolutely haunted by [history]. You can see it at the swap meets.

PAMELA LANSDEN

"It's Monterey, Jack", Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1997


The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

The Devils of Loudun

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Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.

TANITH LEE

The Gods are Thirsty


History is more or less bunk.

HENRY FORD

Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916

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