History

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing. – Willis Thornton, Fable, Fact and History

No modern idea has affected history more than the passion of nationalism. – Charles R. Poinsatte, Understanding History Through the American Experience

The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive. – John Morley, Notes on Politics and History

It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths. – Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Western World

No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history. – William Hazlitt, Table Talk, 1822

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys. – Michael Oakeshott, On History

Historians are themselves products of history. – Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg, Heritage and Challenge

The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history Рits mass appeal. РJos̩ Ortega y Gasset, Historical Reason

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology. – Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons. – Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened. – Elias Canetti, The Human Province

In a certain sense all men are historians. – Thomas Carlyle, Essays: On History

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead. – E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do. – Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History