quotations about history
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
History is not fable agreed upon, but truth disagreed upon.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
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 a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
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. 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
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
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
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"
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
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
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
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
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
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
There is a history in all men's lives.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Henry IV, Part II
Each day is a little bit of history.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
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
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending