Motivational Quotes

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

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Dimnet, Ernest

History tells us more than we want to know about what is wrong with man, and we can hardly turn a page in the daily press without learning the specific time, place, and name of evil. But perhaps the most pervasive evil of all rarely appears in the news. This evil, the waste of human potential, is particularly painful to recognize for it strikes our parents and children, our friends and brothers, ourselves.

Leonard, George

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

History is the devil's scripture.

Byron, Lord

Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

Proverb, African

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

Froude, James A.

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

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

Hegel, Friedrich

10.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Hoffer, Eric

11.

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

13.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Schama, Simon

14.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

16.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

Caesar had perished from the world of men, had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

Vaughan, Henry

18.

History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.

Twain, Mark

19.

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

20.

You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

Hesse, Hermann

21.

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.

Voltaire

22.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

23.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Chesterfield, Lord

24.

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

25.

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

Burke, Edmund

26.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

Jewett, Sarah Orne

27.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

28.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

30.

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

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

33.

It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.

Mussolini, Benito

34.

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.

35.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

36.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

37.

Never forget the importance of history. To know nothing of what happened before you took your place on earth, is to remain a child for ever and ever.

38.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

40.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Conrad, Peter

41.

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

Washington, George

44.

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

45.

However gradual the course of history, there must always be the day, even an hour and minute, when some significant action is performed for the first or last time.

Quennell, Peter

46.

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

48.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.

Hugo, Victor

49.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Butler, Samuel

50.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip