.

.

History is the study of past events in human affairs

• History: The study of past events, particularly in human affairs.  Oxford Dictionary
• History: The study of or a record of) past events considered together, especially events of a particular period, country, or subject.  Cambridge Dictionary
• History: A continuous, systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc., usually written as a chronological account; chronicle.  Dictionary.com
• History:  A chronological record of significant events (such as those affecting a nation or institution) often including an explanation of their causes.  Merriam Webster
• Philosophy,  Science,  The past

.

History is man’s commentary on man

• A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys. Michael Oakeshott
• History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs. Bill Nye
• History is concerned primarily with human phenomena, not with natural; and history is doubly human because, as an idea, it is man’s creation, challenging him to transcend the limits of information about himself and to discover what he is by finding meaning in what he has done. In short, it is man’s commentary on man. John Barker
• History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another. Jacob Burckhardt
• History is her story, too.

.

History is a study of the human spirit

• History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit. Fustel de Coulange
• I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man. Romain Gary
• The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter. Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon
• The historian lays humanity on the couch. Lynn White, Jr.
• History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends. Karl Marx
• History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival. Jeanette Winterson

.

History is about the journey of the human race

• And how fascinating history is – the long, variegated pageant of man’s still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space. George Macaulay Trevelyan
• History: The short trudge from Adam to atom.  Leonard Louis Levinson
• Life is a journey

.

History is a collection of biographies

• History is the essence of innumerable biographies. Thomas Carlyle
• All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history, only biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• History: a collection of epitaphs. Elbert Hubbard
• The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Thomas Carlyle
• The history of the race is but that of the individual “writ large”. George Henry Lewes

.

History is a deep contemplation of the past

• The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation. R. Elton
• A look at the past reminds us of how great the distance is, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures. Robert Penn Warren
• Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future. George Macaulay Trevelyan
• The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. P. Hartley
• History is the daughter of time. Lucien Febvre
• The past,  Contemplation

.

History is the collective memory of the human race

• History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man. Percy Bysshe Shelley
• History attempts to provide society with an artificial collective memory. Mark M. Krug
• Memory

.

.

Many extol the merits of history as a subject and discipline

• For me there is no greater subject than history. How a man can study it and not be forced to become a philosopher, I cannot tell. George E. Wilson
• History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity. Dexter Perkins
• History is the discipline closest to life; and life is rarely free of contradictions. Karl J. Weintraub
• History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. Winston Churchill
• That man was a philosopher, who said that the history of the world was a history of ruin. It is so. Wherever we turn our eyes, we cannot fail to behold some magnificent ruin. Our daily footsteps are imprinted in the dust of things which were once the admiration of men. They are the hieroglyphics of time. Silent and holy are all their teachings. Sometimes they remind us of beauty and peace, and sometimes of terror, tumult and woe. They have nothing to do with the future and present, but the past is their all; and yet how wise, how important their counsels!  Charles Lanman
• 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. Jacques Barzun
• Faithful, well-written history is a map, in which we trace the winding ways and manifold wonders of divine Providence. John Thornton
• History hath triumphed over time, which beside it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over. Walter Raleigh

.

History is part of our nature and a human need

• Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false. Geoffrey Barraclough
• Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history. Carlton J.H. Hayes
• Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them. Guy Fregault
• One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, – to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization. John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones
• Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind. H. Auden
• A generation which ignores history has no past and no future. Robert A. Heinlein
• Human needs

.

History creates chronological order out of chaos

• History is man’s best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order. Robert Brault
• History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it. Henry Steele Commanger
• Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman. George Santayana
• Order,  Chaos

.

History is accessible to all

• No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history. Johan Huizinga

.

History reveals true greatness

• No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history. William Hazlitt
• Greatness

.

History shapes who we are

• Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples. Arthur C. Clarke
• Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Karl Marx
• No man is free of his own history. Anita Brookner

.

History reminds us how good we have it today

• If you think you have it tough, read history books. Bill Maher

.

.

Many are apathetic towards history

• Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation. Conor Cruise O’Brien
• To many of the modern generations, history, like God, is dead. Derek Heather
• Apathy and indifference

.

However, history remains integral to the present

• The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present. David Thelen
• History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. Walter Rauschenbusch
• History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies. Frederick Maurice Powicke
• History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler. Henry Glassie
• History is who we are and why we are the way we are. David McCullough
• History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Thomas Fuller
• The Past lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body. Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their place is not simply back there in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves and resurrected into an ever-changing present. David Lowenthal
• The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. Will and Ariel Durant
• We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? Robert Penn Warren
• Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary. Lynn White, Jr.
• More and more, I tend to read history. I often find it more up to date than the daily newspapers. Joe Murray
• The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past. Thomas Carlyle
• We cannot escape history.  Abraham Lincoln

.

History has much to teach and reveal …

• History balances the frustration of “how far we have to go” with the satisfaction of “how far we have come.” It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time. Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
• In studying history, we are finding out about ourselves, and in the last resort the natural sciences and even mathematics have the same final end. Vivian Hunter Galbraith
• History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions. Hajo Holborn
• History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. Thomas Jefferson
• If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation. John Acton
• What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them. Voltaire
• The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves. James A. Garfield
• To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. Marcus Tullius Cicero
• History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity. Cicero

.

… especially about who we are

• Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree. Michael Crichton
• Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there. S. Naipul
• A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. David McCullough

.

History helps us understand the present

• I’m interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life. Toni Morrison
• You have to know the past to understand the present. Carl Sagan
• If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. Pearl Buck
• The obscurest epoch is today. Robert Louis Stevenson

.

History helps prepare for the future

• History is a vast early warning system. Norman Cousins
• Study the past if you would define the future. Confucius
• A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come. Edward Counsel
• The future,  Preparation

.

History is philosophy teaching by examples

• I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples. Viscount Bolingbroke
• The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object—Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it aggrandizes them, it exaggerates them, it creates heroes and gods. History only depicts man and paints him such as he is. Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
• History should be written as philosophy. Voltaire
• Without philosophy, history seems to me to be deaf and dumb. Ferdinand Baur
• History is philosophy teaching by examples. Thucydides
• The phenomena of history should be so recorded as to aid the reader, and particularly the young reader, in discovering its philosophy, instead of being recorded as they have hitherto generally been, in such a way as to obliterate the better instincts of humanity. Horace Mann
• Philosophy,  Teaching

.

We are doomed to repeat history …

• Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
• History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.
• Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind. H. Auden
• The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it. Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
• We proceed out of history into history again. Sidney Alexander
• It was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history. John Toland
• It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths. Herbert J. Muller
• History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. Konrad Adenauer
• That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. Aldous Huxley
• Reality denied comes back to haunt. Philip K. Dick
• History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again. George R.R. Martin
• What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on the principles deduced from it. W.F. Hegel
• I don’t believe … that history repeats itself. There is no cycle. History is permanently doing the same thing. Sometimes we don’t notice what’s going on, that’s all–and sometimes we have no choice but to see. Michael Marshall
• History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. George Eliot
• History allows us to see the obvious — but unfortunately, not until it is too late. Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
• Is the only lesson of history to be that mankind is unteachable? Winston Churchill
• History is the same thing over and over again. Woody Allen
• History must repeat itself because we pay such little attention to it the first time. Blackie Sherrod

.

… unless we learn from it

• You know the saying: he who doesn’t understand history is doomed to repeat it. And when it’s repeated, the stakes are doubled. Pittacus Lore
• Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it. Lemony Snicket
• History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance. Jackson Wilson
• History is, indeed, little more than the register of the ‘crimes, follies, and misfortunes’ of mankind. But what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• The writing of histories – as Goethe once noted – is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past…. The writing of history liberates us from history. Benedetto Croce
• History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. Maya Angelou
• Bound as our lives are to the tyranny of time, it is through what we know of history that we are delivered from our bonds and escape – into time. L. Rowse
• If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over. Isaac Asimov
• All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do. Edwin H. Land
• Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past. Lewis H. Lapham
• Learning

.

.

Not all advocate history

• History is a great dust heap. Thomas Carlyle
• History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious. Paul Valéry
• History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
• I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is a 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 Ford
• People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery. Aristide Briand
• It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir. Seamus Heaney
• It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk. Rebecca West
• Half the things you’ve been taught in school are just convenient fictions. History is a puppet show for childish minds. John Twelve Hawks
• On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence. Matthew Arnold

.

History provides only a dim candle on the past

• No one can really know the life of his own day, let alone that of times long past. Always the historian sees as in a mirror darkly, the reds and the golds rendered drab by the shadows of time. Earl R. Beck
• History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss. Stull Holt
• Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery. Bruce Catton
• The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard. Barbara Tuchman
• The real history does not get written, because it is not in people’s brains but in their nerves and vitals. Alfred North Whitehead
• When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it. Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
• It frustrates and fascinates me that we’ll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we’ll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good. Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
• All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men. John Alfred Spender

.

History must not be confused with truth

• That is the triumph of history – truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist. Jacques Barzun
• A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false. Thomas Babington Macaulay
• History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there. George Santayana
• History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened. Earnest Albert Hooten
• It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth. Rebecca West
• Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false. Geoffrey Barraclough
• Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. Plato, Ion
• Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. Walter Raleigh
• Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. R. Inge,
• Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. Will and Ariel Durant
• The historian amputates reality. Gaetano Salve-mini
• History is a mixture of error and violence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• History is a set of lies agreed upon. Napoléon Bonaparte
• Where I’m from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren’t true… we call it history. Gregory Maguire
• History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it. Austin O’Malley
• What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end. Jean Cocteau
• The facts of history have been too well rehearsed. John Ashbery
• History would be an excellent thing if only it were true. Leo Tolstoy
• Truth

.

History is part imagination …

• History is petrified imagination. Arthur Baer
• Historians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous. Robert Stinson
• History is a tyranny over the souls of the dead – and so the imagination of the living. William Carlos Williams
• The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination. Gaetano Salvemini
• The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future. Jessamyn West
• Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals. John Dewey
• Imagination

.

… part myth and fable

• There certainly is no useful or entertaining history but the history of the day. All ancient histories, as one of our wits has observed, are only fables that men have agreed to admit as true; and with regard to modern history, it is a chaos out of which it is impossible to make anything… François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
• History is the myth, the true myth, of man’s fall made manifest in time. Henry Miller
• In the Cornell Library of 40,000 volumes there are no novels. There is, however, plenty of fiction in the histories and philosophies. Mary Wilson Little
• It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology. Leopold von Ranke
• Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age. L. Mencken
• People tend to forget that the word “history” contains the word “story”. Ken Burns
• History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? Washington Irving
• No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate–like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history–until it degenerates into fables. Isaac Asimov
• History is not fable agreed upon, but truth disagreed upon. Ivan Panin
• Myths … collected like barnacles on history, obscuring the truth. Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

.

History is the product of fallible memory

• The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from. John Still
• History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. Julian Barnes
• History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. George Santayana
• What dependence can I have on the alleged events of ancient history, when I find such difficulty in ascertaining the truth regarding a matter that has taken place only a few minutes ago, and almost in my own presence! Sir Walter Raleigh
• Memory

.

History differs according to point of view

• The notion that any one person can describe ‘what really happened’ is an absurdity. If ten – or a hundred – people witness an event, there will be ten – or a hundred – different versions of what took place. David and Leigh Eddings
• Radical historians now tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. Mason Cooley
• It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. Bill Vaughan

.

History contains bias and prejudice

• History is the story of events, with praise or blame. Cotton Mather
• The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. Mark Twain
• Historians are themselves products of history. Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg
• The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him. Heinrich von Sybel
• By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
• History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable, and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices. Bill Watterson
• Prejudice

.

History is written by the victors

• History is the propaganda of the victors. Ernst Toller
• History is written by the winners. Alex Haley
• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. Winston S. Churchill
• Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters. African Proverb
• We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre. Dick Gregory
• History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes. Paul Eldridge
• History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon? Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
• Victory

.

History is at the mercy of historians …

• The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. Whitney Brown
• Princes should have more to fear from historians than have ugly women from great painters. Antonio Pérez
• Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians. Franklin P. Jones
• God cannot alter the past, though historians can. Samuel Butler
• Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. Herodotus
• Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well. Frank Herbert

.

… depending greatly on their interpretation and opinion

• The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers, out of the irreconcilable opinions of men. Smith Fussner
• History is an argument without end. Pieter Geyl
• History is a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.
• There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides. Philip Howard
• Unfortunately, it is also true that the age’s interests often color the past with unhistoric hues. Wendell H. Stephenson
• The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do. Louis Gottschalk
• All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are non-existent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. Edward Said
• History: The version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
• Interpretation

.

History is sometimes exaggerated to make it more interesting

• When a history book contains no lies, it is always tedious. Anatole France
• The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Machiavelli
• The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story. Christian Nestell Bovee

.

History is constantly rewritten to fit the present

• We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it. S.J. Watson
• The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened. Peter Berger
• History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story. Buzz Aldrin

.

History contains some degree of whitewashing

• Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos. Thomas A. Bailey

.

History often becomes a political tool

• History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions. Ted Koppel
• History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral but forced to enlist in every army. Allan Nevins
• History is past politics, and politics present history. John Robert Seeley
• History is politics projected into the past. N. Pokrovsky
• It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons. Arthur Conan Doyle
• A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents. Richard Reeves
• There is nothing more dangerous than history used as a defense, or history used for preaching; history used as a tool is no longer history. Marcel Trudel
• Too many so-called historians are really ‘hysterians’; their thinking is more visceral than cerebral. When their duties as citizens clash with their responsibilities as scholars, Clio frequently takes a back seat. Thomas A. Bailey
• The study of history is the playground of patriotism. George M. Wrong
• Politics

.

History is a kind of gossip

• Historians are gossips who tease the dead. Voltaire
• Historian: A broad-gauge gossip. Ambrose Bierce
• History is merely gossip. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
• History: gossip well told. Elbert Hubbard
• Gossip

.

History is petrified news

• Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers. Thomas Carlyle
• A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards. Karl Kraus
• News: the first rough draft of history.   Ben Bradlee

.

History does not compensate

• History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong. John Acton

.

.

Good history admits it is fallible and remains open

• History is fallible as every man is fallible. But it is likewise trustworthy, as a man is trustworthy who has looked into himself and come to know how blended are dust and fire in the innermost recesses of the human heart. Arthur Bestor
• History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases. William Stubbs
• History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves. George Macaulay Trevelyan
• Openness

.

Good history presents objective facts …

• It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment. Francis Bacon
• Facts

.

… allowing the reader to make their own judgements

• History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves. George Macaulay Trevelyan
• The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us. Michel de Montaigne

.

Good history is presented as a living whole

• History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass. Frederic Harrison
• History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern. Cicely Veronica Wedgwood
• The historian amputates reality. Gaetano Salve-mini

.

Good history makes the past and the dead come alive

• If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me! George Macaulay Trevelyan
• A mere compilation of facts presents only the skeleton of History; we do but little for her if we cannot invest her with life, clothe her in the habiliments of her day, and enable her to call forth the sympathies of succeeding generations. Hannah Farnham Lee, The Huguenots in France and America
• As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances. Walt Whitman
• Then, Sir, you would reduce all history to no better than an almanack, a mere chronological series of remarkable events. James Boswell, 1775
• The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Machiavelli
• If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. Rudyard Kipling
• History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them. Jodi Picoult
• The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: “Lazarus, come forth!” and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun. Austin O’Malley
• Death

.

Good history can be written only where there is freedom

• History can be well written only in a free country. Voltaire
• There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes. Chamfort
• Freedom

.

.

History is full of horror and blood …

• Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors. Nicolas Chamfort
• Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Ayn Rand
• History is a bath of blood. William James
• History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce
• The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. Albert Camus
• History is a mixture of error and violence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor. Robert A. Heinlein
• Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort. Mason Cooley
• History is the autobiography of a madman. Alexander Herzen
• History is like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it. Peter Carey

.

… a tale of war, conflict and revolution …

• History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs — the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam. Robert Penn Warren
• History is mainly a record of wars, and it has bequeathed the sorry fact that still nations devote more money to armies and navies than they do to education or the arts. James Platt
• History is a relay of revolutions. Saul Alinksy

.

… a testament to the crimes and shortcomings of the human race

• If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history. Pierre Bayle
• History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age. Will and Ariel Durant
• Sin writes histories, goodness is silent. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• For what is history, but… huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species. Washington Irving
• Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. Jean Genet
• History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times. Voltaire, L’Ingénu
• History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. Jules Romains
• Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers
• Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction. H. Auden, A Certain World
• History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others. Voltaire
• Every historian has described the age in which he happened to write, as the worst, because he has only heard of the wickedness of other times, but has felt and seen that of his own. Charles Caleb Colton
• The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it. Charles Caleb Colton
• History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Abba Eban
• Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil but by people being fundamentally people. Terry Pratchett

.

The truth is that history, as a discipline, tends to ignore times of happiness and peace

• History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books. Thomas Carlyle
• Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river. Will Durant
• Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed. Bernard Beckett
• There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass. Isaac Asimov
• Happiness,  Inner peace

.

Good history focuses on the good as well as the bad

• Human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. Howard Zinn

.

.

History is a dramatic play

• History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background. Thomas Carlyle
• History is a pageant and not a philosophy. Augustine Birrell
• History is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick. Max Nordau
• We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play. Régis Debray
• The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil. William Hazlitt

.

History is a painting

• History is an aggregation of truths, half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip, and official prevarications. It is a canvas upon which thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed their conceptions and interpretations of a day and an era. Some motifs are grotesque and some are magnificent. Philip D. Jordan
• If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints. Allen Nevins
• History paints the human heart. Napoleon I

.

History is a poem

• History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man. Percy Bysshe Shelley
• It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right. Thomas Carlyle
• Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. Plato, Ion
• History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses. Charles Angoff

.

History is gallery of pictures

• Real history is a candid shot. The history of textbooks poses for its pictures. Terri Guillemets
• History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. Alexis de Tocqueville
• History is but the nail on which the picture hangs. Alexandre Dumas

.

History is a tapestry

• The tapestry of history is woven of many threads. Jacqueline Carey

.

History is a novel

• History begins in novel and ends in essay. Thomas Babington Macaulay
• History is a novel for which the people is the author. Alfred de Vigny
• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. L. Mencken

.

.

History and writing

• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. L. Mencken
• Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. Walter Savage Landor
• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. Henry James
• Writing

.

History and nations

• History is the sextant of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position. Allan Nevins
• The study of history is the playground of patriotism. George M. Wrong
• A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. David McCullough

.

History and other disciplines

• As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation. John Smith
• All other forms of history – economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology – seem to me history with the history left out. J.P. Taylor
• History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology. Hippolyte Taine
• History is the synthesis of all social sciences turned towards the past. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

.

• After you’ve heard two eyewitness accounts of an automobile accident, you begin to worry about history. Tim Allen
• Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs. David Ben-Gurion
• Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1. Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2. Advising the President. 3. Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
• For most of history, was a woman. Virginia Woolf
• For the first time in history, sex is more dangerous than the cigarette afterward. Jay Leno
• God cannot alter the past, though historians can. Samuel Butler
• He is so old, when he was in school they didn’t teach history!
• His impact on history would be no more than the whiff of scent on a lady’s handkerchief. David Lloyd George
• Historian: A broad-gauge gossip. Ambrose Bierce
• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. L. Mencken
• Historians are gossips who tease the dead. Voltaire
• History is a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.
• History: The short trudge from Adam to atom.  Leonard Louis Levinson
• History doesn’t repeat itself – historians merely repeat each other.
• History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Mark Twain
• History is a pack of lies we play on the dead. Voltaire
• History is an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools. Ambrose Bierce
• History is facts which have become legend in the end. Legends are lies which have become history in the end.   Cocteau Jean
• History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. Voltaire
• History is more or less bunk. Henry Ford
• History is the short trudge from Adam to atom. Leonard L. Levinson
• History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided. Konrad Adenauer
• History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes. Paul Eldridge
• History must repeat itself because we pay such little attention to it the first time. Blackie Sherrod
• History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age. Will and Ariel Durant
• History repeats itself; historians repeat one another. Rupert Brooke
• History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Abba Eban
• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. Winston Churchill
• History would be an excellent thing if only it were true. Leo Tolstoy
• History, that excitable and unreliable old lady. Guy de Maupassant
• History: An account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools. Ambrose Bierce
• History: The version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
• I grew up in Europe where the history comes from. Eddie Izzard
• I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course. Tom Stoppard
• I was reading a book “The History of Glue” – I couldn’t put it down. Tim Vine
• If history is going to repeat itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again. Terry Venables
• If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history, the three of them together. Theodore White
• Isn’t it great to live in the 21st century? Where deleting history has become more important than making it.
• It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. Bill Vaughan
• Like most of those who study history he [Napoleon III] learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones. J.P. Taylor
• More than any other time in history, mankind faces a cross-roads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Woody Allen
• Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil but by people being fundamentally people. Terry Pratchett
• Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. Thomas Sowell
• One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. Durant’s Discovery
• People who make history know nothing about history; you can see that in the sort of history they make. K. Chesterton
• Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians. Franklin Jones
• She was old too when she went to school they didn’t have history. Rodney Dangerfield
• That’s history; I say history because it happened in the past. Murray Walker
• The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies. Marc Bloch
• The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. Whitney Brown
• There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good. Stephen Colbert
• Those who abhor history are compelled to rewrite it. Solomon Short
• Those who cannot remember history are doomed to learn it from Oliver Stone movies. John Harkness
• Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. Herodotus
• What men learn from history is that men do not learn from history.
• When I was at school I was great at history – oh wait no I wasn’t. Stewart Francis
• Women with “pasts” interest men because men hope that history will repeat itself. Mae West
• You know you’re getting older when you notice that more and more history questions happened in your lifetime! Tom Wilson

.

.