Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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

- Froude, James A.

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

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

Conrad, Peter

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Gibbon, Edward

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Froude, James A.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

15.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

16.

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

Gladstone, William E.

17.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

18.

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

19.

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

20.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

22.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

23.

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

24.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

25.

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

26.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

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

Vaughan, Henry

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Burke, Edmund

34.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Chesterfield, Lord

35.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

36.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip

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.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

43.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

44.

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

Proverb, African

45.

History is the devil's scripture.

Byron, Lord

46.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

47.

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

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

Twain, Mark

50.

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