Quotes on history…

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. ~Pearl Buck

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” – Mark Twain

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. (James Baldwin, Notes of a
Native Son)

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters. (African
Proverb)

There certainly is no useful or entertaining history but the history of the day. All ancient
histories, as one of our wits has observed, are only fables that men have agreed to admit as
true; and with regard to modern history, it is a chaos out of which it is impossible to make
anything... (Voltaire)

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. (Michael Crichton, Timeline)

The study of history is the playground of patriotism. (George M. Wrong)

History is herstory, too. (Author Unknown)

History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

(Napoleon Bonaparte)

History is a novel for which the people is the author. (Alfred de Vigny, Réflexions sur la
Vérité dans l'Art)

History: gossip well told. (Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary)

If you think you have it tough, read history books. (Bill Maher)

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

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

History never looks like history when you are living through it. (John W. Gardner)

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. (Samuel Butler, "Prose Observations")

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

History is a vast early warning system. (Norman Cousins)

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. (Will and Ariel Durant, Our Oriental
Heritage)

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up. (Author Unknown)

People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery. (Aristide Briand)

The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present. (David Thelen)

Princes should have more to fear from historians than have ugly women from great painters.
~Antonio Pérez, Aforismos

Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians. ~Franklin P.
Jones

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 Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

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. (George E. Wilson)

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. (A. Whitney
Brown, The Big Picture)

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
(George Santayana)

I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world.
History is more or less bunk. It is a tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only
history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. ~Henry Ford

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future. (Jessamyn West)

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. (Alexis de
Tocqueville)

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. (William Stubbs)

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be
useful to the modern traveler. (Henry Glassie)

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. (David
McCullough)

Historians are themselves products of history. (Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg,
Heritage and Challenge)

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 History is written by the winners. (Alex Haley
Nathaniel Hawthorne)

History... is an aggregation of truths, half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors,

prejudices, personal narratives, gossip, and official prevarications. It is a canvas upon which
thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed their conceptions and interpretations
of a day and an era. Some motifs are grotesque and some are magnificent. (Philip D. Jordan)

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. (Philip Howard)

The historian and the detective have much in common. Mark M. Krug

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people
killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks,
unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even
whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river. (Will Durant)

History is the propaganda of the victors. (Ernst Toller)

History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make. (Author Unknown)

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