Quotes About History❓

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.—Churchill

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction.—Jacque Barzun

History shows that most of the positive or beneficial developments in human society have occurred as a result of care and compassion.—Dalai Lama

Authors are regularly asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: ‘History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves’.—Diamond

"Yesterday is History,/'tis so far away—/yesterday is Poetry,/'tis Philosophy/Yesterday is Mystery—/Where it is today—/While we shrewdly speculate/Flutter both away.—Emily Dickenson

What is history after all? History is facts which become legend in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.—Jean Cocteau

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.—Max Lerner

History is a set of lies agreed upon. —Napoleon

The student who reads history will unconsciously develop what is the highest value of history: judgment in world affairs. This is a permanent good, not because history repeats—we can never exactly match past and present situations—but because the 'tendency of things' shows an amazing uniformity within any given civilization. The great historian Jacob Burckhardt said of historical knowledge, it is not 'to make us more clever the next time, but wiser for all time.'

Plus, a person endowed with the knowledge of history reacts a good deal more serenely and temperately to the things that he encounters both in his own life and in the life of the country in which he lives. Besides which, history is a story—full of color and dramatic events and persons, of triumphs and dreadful actions, which must be known in order to form a true notion of humankind.—Jacque Barzun

History is not what happened but who told the story.—??

I have always been—I think any student of history almost inevitably is—a cheerful pessimist.—Jacque Barzun