quotations about history
The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mandell Creighton, Apr. 5, 1887
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 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
History is the autobiography of a madman.
ALEXANDER HERZEN
Dr. Krupov
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
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
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
What are our pretended histories? Fables, jest-books, satires, apologies, anything but what they profess to be.
A. H. EVERETT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to John Adams, August 1, 1816
History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Last of the Mohicans
Old men can make war, but it is children who will make history.
RAY MERRITT
Full of Grace
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PLATO
Ion