Motivational Quotes

History and historians

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

- Wilde, Oscar

History and historians Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about History and historians

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.

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

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

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.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

Bierce, Ambrose

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

France, Anatole

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Study men, not historians.

Truman, Harry S

10.

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

11.

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Froude, James A.

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.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Chesterfield, Lord

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.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

Burke, Edmund

19.

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

20.

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

Proverb, African

21.

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.

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Conrad, Peter

24.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

25.

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

Cromwell, Oliver

26.

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

Hoffer, Eric

27.

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

Gibbon, Edward

28.

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

29.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

Fiebig, Jim

30.

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

31.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Wells, H.G.

32.

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

33.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

Mencken, H. L.

34.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

35.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Guedalla, Philip

36.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

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

Hegel, Friedrich

38.

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

Vaughan, Henry

39.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

47.

The history of mankind is his character.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

History is the distillation of rumor.

Carlyle, Thomas