WHAT IS HISTORY?

History is the lie commonly agreed upon. (Voltaire)

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. (George Orwell)

History is more or less bunk. (Henry Ford)

History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers,
mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. (Ambrose Bierce)

History could be divided into events which do not matter and events which probably never occurred. (W.R.
Inge)

History is only a confused heap of facts. (G.K. Chesterton)

History is Philosophy teaching by examples. (Thucydides)

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. (Cicero)

The first lesson of history is the good of evil. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history. (Kahlil Gibran)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (Santayana)

History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past. (Johann
Huizinga)

A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying
to do. (Woodrow Wilson)

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a
very serious task, ... and possibly a tragic one. (Hermann Hesse)

History is a people's memory, and without memory man is demoted to the lower animals. (Malcolm X)

Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducible from
it. (G.W.F. Hegel)

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
(Abba Eban)

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. (Gustave
Flaubert)

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the
Great Men who have worked here. (Thomas Carlyle)

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
(Samuel Johnson)

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth. (Cicero)
History is the "know thyself" of humanity -- the self-consciousness of mankind. (Droysen)

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx)

History is a science, no less and no more. (J.B. Bury)

History is past politics and politics present history. (E.A. Freeman)

We teach history only when it can be made into an entertaining anecdote, a procedure which is about as
sound as leaving the teaching of sexual hygiene to a commercial traveller. (Aubrey Maran)

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. (Joseph Conrad)

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . .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. (Jane Austen)

The historian can learn much from the novelist. (Samuel Eliot Morison)

History is an argument without end. (Peter Geyl)

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it. (Oscar Wilde)

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it.
(Otto von Bismarck)

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing. (Boris
Pasternak)

Historical knowledge is not a variety of knowledge, but it is knowledge itself; it is the form which
completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing. (Benedetto Croce)

Genuine historical knowledge requires nobility of character, a profound understanding of human existence
-- not detachment and objectivity. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can. It is perhaps because they can be
useful to him in this respect that he tolerates their existence. (Samuel Butler)

It is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
(Brian Friel)

History and myth are two aspects of a kind of grand pattern in human destiny: history is the mass of
observable or recorded fact, but myth is the abstract or essence of it. (Robertson Davies)

All statements about the past can be considered as very crude ways of expressing possible, hypothetical
judgments about future experiences. (Pardon Tillinghast)

Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the
redoing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the present. (R.G. Collingwood)

Nothing capable of being memorized is history. (R.G. Collingwood)

History... is a tool we use each generation or each year to help get along in the world, discarding the old
tool for a new one whenever necessary. (Paul K. Conkin)