What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them. – Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. – Bill Vaughan
Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers
A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures. – Robert Penn Warren
Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary. – Lynn White, Jr.
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. – A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future. – Jessamyn West
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1856
Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. – Walter Raleigh, History of the World
History balances the frustration of “how far we have to go” with the satisfaction of “how far we have come.” It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time. – Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living. – James Robertson
The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination. – Gaetano Salvemini, Historian and Scientist
History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases. – William Stubbs
The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers
History does not unfold: it piles up. – Robert M. Adams, Bad Mouth
The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe. – Vincent Starrett, Buried Caesars
History is a pageant and not a philosophy. – Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta: The Muse of History
Radical historians now tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. – Mason Cooley
History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology. – Hippolyte Taine
History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. – Jules Romains, Men of Good Will
