Motivational Quotes

History and historians

History is but a confused heap of facts.

- Chesterfield, Lord

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

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

Carlyle, Thomas

History is the devil's scripture.

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

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

Froude, James A.

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

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

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

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

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

Gibbon, Edward

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Proverb, African

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Gladstone, William E.

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

21.

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

Hoffer, Eric

22.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

23.

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

24.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Butler, Samuel

25.

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

26.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

27.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

28.

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

29.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

30.

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

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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.

33.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

34.

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

Burke, Edmund

35.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

36.

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Conrad, Peter

42.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

43.

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

Vaughan, Henry

44.

The whole past is the procession of the present.