Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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

- Gladstone, William E.

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Vaughan, Henry

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

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

Twain, Mark

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

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

Froude, James A.

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

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

11.

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

Gibbon, Edward

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

History is the devil's scripture.

Byron, Lord

17.

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

18.

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.

19.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

20.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

21.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Gladstone, William E.

23.

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

24.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

25.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

28.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

29.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

30.

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

31.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

32.

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

Conrad, Peter

33.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

34.

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

Proverb, African

35.

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

36.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

37.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

38.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

39.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip

40.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

42.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

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.

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

49.

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

50.

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.