Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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.

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History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

History is the devil's scripture.

Byron, Lord

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

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Hegel, Friedrich

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

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

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

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

Conrad, Peter

10.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

11.

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.

12.

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

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.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

20.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Chesterfield, Lord

21.

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.

22.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

23.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

24.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

26.

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

27.

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

Gladstone, William E.

28.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

29.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

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

31.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

35.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

Proverb, African

37.

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

Twain, Mark

38.

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

Vaughan, Henry

39.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

40.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

42.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Gibbon, Edward

46.

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

47.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

48.

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

Froude, James A.

49.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

50.

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