Motivational Quotes

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

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

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

Conrad, Peter

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

Johnson, Samuel

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

Camus, Albert

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

Hoffer, Eric

History is the devil's scripture.

Byron, Lord

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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.

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Chesterfield, Lord

13.

I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all; they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

14.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

15.

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

16.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

17.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

19.

History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

Gibbon, Edward

20.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

22.

History is one of the most remarkable things in our lives. The mere fact it occurred makes it remarkable.

23.

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

Vaughan, Henry

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

26.

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

27.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

28.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

30.

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

31.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip

32.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

33.

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

34.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

35.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

39.

He is the purest figure in history. [About George Washington]

Gladstone, William E.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Burke, Edmund

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.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

45.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

46.

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

Proverb, African

47.

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

48.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

49.

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

50.

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

Froude, James A.