Motivational Quotes

History and historians

The whole past is the procession of the present.

- Carlyle, Thomas

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about 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

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

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

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Butler, Samuel

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Froude, James A.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

10.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

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.

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

Gibbon, Edward

13.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

14.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

15.

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

Gladstone, William E.

16.

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

Vaughan, Henry

21.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

22.

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

23.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

24.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Hoffer, Eric

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

29.

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Burke, Edmund

31.

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

32.

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

Proverb, African

33.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

34.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

35.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Conrad, Peter

40.

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

41.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip

45.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

48.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

49.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

50.

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