Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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

- Twain, Mark

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

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

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

Gibbon, Edward

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

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

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

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

14.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

15.

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

16.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

17.

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

18.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

19.

The Thames is liquid history.

Burns, John

20.

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

Burke, Edmund

21.

While we read history we make history.

Curtis, George William

22.

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

Conrad, Peter

23.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

24.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Chesterfield, Lord

27.

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

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

30.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Wells, H.G.

32.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

33.

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

34.

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

35.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

Vaughan, Henry

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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.

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

41.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

42.

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

Hoffer, Eric

43.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

44.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

45.

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

46.

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

Gladstone, William E.

47.

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

Proverb, African

48.

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

Froude, James A.

49.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

50.

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.