quotations about history
History, with scarcely an exception, ought to be rewritten.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
History. It has always vaguely interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of previous deaths.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed Providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality and to delectation. And therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man's nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
The vividness and force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on things.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, March 15, 1880
You know you're getting older when you notice that more and more history questions happened in your lifetime!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jul. 3, 1999
History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past.
DANA ARNOLD
Reading Architectural History
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
Lacon
Old men can make war, but it is children who will make history.
RAY MERRITT
Full of Grace
History is the autobiography of a madman.
ALEXANDER HERZEN
Dr. Krupov
History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Last of the Mohicans
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to John Adams, August 1, 1816
Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PLATO
Ion