Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Hegel, Friedrich

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Gibbon, Edward

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

13.

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

14.

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

Conrad, Peter

15.

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

16.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

25.

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

Vaughan, Henry

26.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

27.

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.

28.

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

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

30.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Butler, Samuel

31.

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

32.

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

33.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

34.

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

Gladstone, William E.

35.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

36.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

37.

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

38.

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

Froude, James A.

39.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

40.

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

41.

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

Twain, Mark

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

Burke, Edmund

45.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

46.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

47.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

49.

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.

50.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire