964 History Quotes to share with friends and relatives

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way. – Richard Ellman

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. – Walter Rauschenbusch

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

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. – Jean Genet

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious. – Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them. – Guy Fregault, La guerre de la conquÃªte

History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral, but forced to enlist in every army. – Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought – two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Fate

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, The Comments of Bagshot

A boy who hears a lesson in history ended by the beauty of peace, and how Napoleon brought ruin upon the world and that he should be forever cursed, will not long have much confidence in his teacher. He wants to hear more about the fighting and less about the peace negotiations. – William Lee Howard, Peace, Dolls and Pugnacity

[H]istory 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, The Interpretation of History

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, The Sketch Book: Westminster Abbey

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, History of New York

Take from the altars of the past the fire – not the ashes. – Jean Jaures

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us. – Michel de Montaigne, translated

The obscurest epoch is today. – Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains

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

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

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

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