quotations about history
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.
ISAAC ASIMOV
The Gods Themselves
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
MAYA ANGELOU
On the Pulse of the Morning
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood--read the speeches of Mussolini--at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Observer, Sep. 22, 1957
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present -- the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject.
DANA ARNOLD
Reading Architectural History
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Time Magazine, Oct. 6, 1952
History is philosophy teaching by examples.
THUCYDIDES
The History of the Peloponnesian War
What are our pretended histories? Fables, jest-books, satires, apologies, anything but what they profess to be.
A. H. EVERETT
attributed, Day's Collacon
History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
History gets written by the winners.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Lost Souls
History does not belong to us, we belong to it.
HANS-GEORGE GADAMER
Truth and Method
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
Thoughts
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
Heretics of Dune
What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.
JANE ADDAMS
address to the Union League Club of Chicago, Feb. 23, 1903
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe