Quotes about history and historians

"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

Allen, Woody on history and historians
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"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 on history and historians   

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"Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."

Bacon, Francis on history and historians
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"To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine."

Beerbohm, Sir Max on history and historians   

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"An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."

Bierce, Ambrose on history and historians   

"Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip."

Bierce, Ambrose on history and historians   

"The main thing is to make history, not to write it."

Bismarck, Otto Von on history and historians
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"From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us."

Bonaparte, Napoleon on history and historians   

"People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors."

Burke, Edmund on history and historians   

"The Thames is liquid history."

Burns, John on history and historians   

"God cannot alter the past, but historians can."

Butler, Samuel on history and historians
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"History is the devil's scripture."

Byron, Lord on history and historians
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"And having wisdom with each studious year, in meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, and shaped his weapon with an edge severe, sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer."

Byron, Lord on history and historians   

"In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history."

Camus, Albert on history and historians   

"History is the distillation of rumor."

Carlyle, Thomas on history and historians   

"Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles."

Carlyle, Thomas on history and historians   

"The whole past is the procession of the present."

Carlyle, Thomas on history and historians   

"The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

Carlyle, Thomas on history and historians
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"For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future."

Cervantes, Miguel De on history and historians   

"History is but a confused heap of facts."

Chesterfield, Lord on history and historians   

"Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on history and historians   

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"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."

Churchill, Winston on history and historians
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"The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves."

Cicero, Marcus T. on history and historians
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"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge."

Cicero, Marcus T. on history and historians
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"The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent."

Conrad, Peter on history and historians   

"What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted."

Cromwell, Oliver on history and historians   

"While we read history we make history."

Curtis, George William on history and historians   

"History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history."

Darrow, Clarence on history and historians
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"The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present."

Dimnet, Ernest on history and historians   

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."

Durant, William J. on history and historians   

"Our best history is still poetry."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on history and historians
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"Might does not make right, it only makes history."

Fiebig, Jim on history and historians
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"I can see only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen."

Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens on history and historians   

"Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times."

Flaubert, Gustave on history and historians
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"History is more or less bunk."

Ford, Henry on history and historians   

"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."

Forster, Edward M. on history and historians   

"History books that contain no lies are extremely dull."

France, Anatole on history and historians   

"The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies."

Froude, James A. on history and historians   

"The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders."

Fuller, R. Buckminster on history and historians   

"To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man."

Gandhi, Mahatma on history and historians
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