Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

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

Gladstone, William E.

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

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

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

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.

10.

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

11.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

12.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

13.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

14.

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

Gibbon, Edward

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

17.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

18.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

19.

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

21.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

22.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

24.

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, African

29.

History is the devil's scripture.

Byron, Lord

30.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

31.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Vaughan, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Hoffer, Eric

39.

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

40.

Jewett, Sarah Orne

41.

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.

42.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

43.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

44.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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