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History Quotations History Quotes From Wisdom Quotes: Quotations to inspire and challenge - by Jone Johnson Lewis Alex Haley: In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future. Ambrose Bierce: HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. David Ben Gurion: Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs. David C. McCullough: History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are. E. L. Doctorow: History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. Edward Gibbon: I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past. Etienne Gilson: History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought. Friedrich Von Schiller: The history of the world is the world's court of justice. George Bernard Shaw: We learn from history that we learn nothing from history. George Santayana: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. George Wilhelm Hegel: What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles. Gerda Lerner: What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are 'the lessons of history'? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their Eric T. MacKnight • http://www.EricMacKnight.com/ Quotations About History interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past. Gerda Lerner: We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events. Goethe: Patriotism ruins history. Gustave Flaubert: Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. Henry Ford: History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. Henry Steele Commager: History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation. Jane Austen: History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome. (spoken by Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey) Jane Haddam: People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half. Jawaharial Nehru: A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. Karl Marx: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Page 2 of 23 Quotations About History Kurt Vonnegut: History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Mark Twain: A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. Oscar Wilde: Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. Pearl S. Buck: One faces the future with one's past. Peter Berger: The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re- explains what has happened. Ralph Waldo Emerson: There is properly no history; only biography. Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. Robert F. Kennedy: Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Robert Fulghum: I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death. Tennesse Claflin: The history of woman is the history of the continued and universal oppression of one sex by the other. Page 3 of 23 Quotations About History Thich Nhat Hanh: Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life. Thomas Carlyle: History, a distillation of rumour. Thucydides: History is Philosophy teaching by examples. Vita Sackville-West: I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong. Walt Whitman: Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books. Will Durant: One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. Winston Churchill: History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. Source: http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_history.html Anyone who cannot give an account to oneself of the past three thousand years remains in darkness, without experience, living from day to day. —Goethe The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today...The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow. —G.M. Trevelyan, "Autobiography of an Historian" An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949). Page 4 of 23 Quotes About History By Ferenc M. Szasz Mr. Szasz is a profe ssor of history at the University of New Mexico. Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake. Robert Penn Warren History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another. Max Beerbohm To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity. Roy P. Basler Do not applaud me. It is not I who speaks to you, but history which speaks through my mouth. Fustel de Coulanges History must be written of, by and for the survivors. Anonymous History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions. Voltaire The history of states and nations has provided some income for historiographers and book dealers, but I know no other purpose it may have served. Borne Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis. Schopenhauer History, history! We fools, what do we know or care. William Carlos Williams History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose. H. Plumb [History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman. Thomas Carlyle History is a science, no more and no less. B. Bury The past is always a rebuke to the present. Eric T. MacKnight • http://www.EricMacKnight.com/ Quotations About History Robert Penn Warren A country without a memory is a country of madmen. George Santayana History is interim reports issued periodically. Anonymous Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality. Pieter Geyl History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning. Lord Bolingbroke History teaches everything including the future.
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