c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.
— Winston S. Churchill
[On school uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.
— George Carlin
I am the Love that Dare not Speak its Name
— Alfred Bruce Douglas
Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict---its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself---what's the expression---ah, yes, 'not with a bang, but a whimper,' as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.
— Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten
Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.
— Lauren Willig
There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings.
— Michelle   Cooper, A Brief History of Montmaray
Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
— Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
We learn from history that we don't learn from history!
— Desmond Tutu
There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.
— Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.
— Stephen Fry, Making History
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
— Stephen E. Ambrose
But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.
— Irène Némirovsky, Suite Francaise
Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me. 
— Mercedes Lackey, The Fire Rose
Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.
— Lauren Willig
How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.
— Winston S. Churchill
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.
— Joanne Harris, The Gospel of Loki
If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.
— Eugen Weber
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
— Robert Penn Warren
Anybody can make history
—  only a great man can write it.
I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.
— Takeshi Shudo, The Art of Pokemon, the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back!
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
— Stephen R. Covey
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
— Robin Hobb
Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.
— Niccolò Machiavelli
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
— Ambrose Bierce
History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.
— Paul     Murray, Skippy Dies
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
— Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/The Communist Manifesto
It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
In the words of a very famous dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
— Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States
I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.
— Kage Baker
...as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.
— Howard Carter, Tomb of Tutankhamen
Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Human history is a Gaian dream.
— Terence McKenna
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Insecure people often falsify the past, in order to make the future pure.
— Shannon L. Alder
History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.
— Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro
Sometimes - history needs a push.
— Vladimir Lenin
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
— Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
— James  Burke, Connections
Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.
— Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
— Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life
The student is to read history actively not passively.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays
Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to 
— David McCullough
There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.
— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
— Alan Bennett, The History Boys
The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.
— Anderson Cooper
My mind is in a state of constant rebellion. I believe that will always be so.
— George Mallory
The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Patterns repeat themselves in history
— Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
— Winston S. Churchill
But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
— G.K. Chesterton
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
— David McCullough
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)
— Gustave Flaubert
For feeling, not events, is to me the essence of history.
— Christopher Pike, The Last Vampire
...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused.
— Bruce Feiler
Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.
— Jomo Kenyatta
Never lend if you need repayment
—  never give where you want a return.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Experience: the vehicle of history. Teenagers: the driving force behind fatal accidents.
— Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
— Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
...That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.
— Lois Lowry, Messenger
Somewhere, all the people we have loved and lost are still among us, in the house that we call history.
— Graham Masterton
Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don't need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It's obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we'll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.
— Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
— Hannah Arendt
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
— Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments
Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.
— Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
— H.L. Mencken
Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.
— Peter Hitchens
You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them."(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
— David McCullough, John Adams
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
— Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
— Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations
George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history.
— Helen Thomas
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
— Mark Twain
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.
— John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
— Salman Rushdie, Shame
History is a vast early warning system.
— Norman Cousins
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.
— Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos
The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.
— Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas
Fools who don't respect the past are doomed to repeat it.
— Nico Robin
And I thought:History is like a horror story.
— Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
— Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.
— Woodrow Wilson
She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.
— Stuart Jaffe, 10 Bits of My Brain
The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
— Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
— Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
— Abraham Lincoln
AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
— George Orwell
What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other
— Orson Welles, Mr. Arkadin
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
— Joan Didion, Where I Was From
A man who could not see the end of his"provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
There's no crying in the rank book.
— William Morton
Just a little off the top!"- A. Boleyn
— Robert Lynn Asprin, M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action
It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity. 
— Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip
I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.
— Glen Cook, Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery
Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
— Umberto Eco, Baudolino
All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
— Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers
Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile
Because some things that seem unimportant now can change the course of human history -- and I am a student of human history.
— Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
— Thomas Sowell
Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully displayed it in public. It was those with moral values who could no longer freely walk in a public park without having to witness a revolting display.What happened to the public censors who protected the majority of citizenry from moral decadence? Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency? Did freedom mean anyone could do anything they wanted anytime they wanted, without consequences?
— Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind
This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
— Ambrose Bierce
It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.
— Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington
We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to inheritance left by our ancestors.
— Mahatma Gandhi, The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
— Albert Camus
This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer. 
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Think of tomorrow, the past can't be mended.
— Confucius
...the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey.
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
For indeed, what is more dire than the evils which today afflict the world? What is more terrible for the discerning than the unfolding events? What is more pitiable and frightening for those who endure them? To see a barbarous people of the desert overrunning another's lands as though they were their own; to see civilization itself being ravaged by wild and untamed beasts whose form alone is human.
— Maximus the Confessor
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Some men are born posthumously.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we haven't sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr
You can't really move forward until you look back.[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]
— Cornel West
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. 
— Thomas Keneally, Searching for Schindler: A Memoir
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
— Charles Baudelaire
History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.
— Kedar Joshi
In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.
— C.G. Jung
Nothing of importance happened today.
— King George III
It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast betweenthe standards of the past and the standards of the present. Somefulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
— Norman Davies, Europe
I have seen a stunning amount of death and destruction. Creation yes, but more death than birth. Mankind has learned nothing from their forefathers. Their ancestors. It is true what they say: history does repeat itself, Delacroix, and those after history are left to make it, but how can they,” he removed his hand from the globe, waving it thoughtfully through the air, “when it has already been made?
— S.C. Parris, The Dark World
...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing…
— Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½  Chapters
When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.
— Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time
— Winona LaDuke
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
We should use our imagination more than our memory.
— Shimon Peres
History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.
— Malcolm X
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
— John Maynard Keynes
Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.
— Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine
Whatever happened in those more than one hundred years, from the time my great-great-great grandfather studied law to the time when my own father took his bar exam in 1989, I may never know. Perhaps it was just greed and the good, old-fashion corruption that comes with power. The Drexlers have moved from the fight for human rights to the fight for corporations and wealthy individuals. We file their taxes, write their contracts, clean up their messes. As I see it, we have become little more than glorified Public Relations reps
— Gwenn Wright, The BlueStocking Girl
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.
— Christopher Hitchens
For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.
— Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon
History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
— Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.
— Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Each life contains as much meaning as all of history.
— Catherine Chung, Forgotten Country
Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.
— Walter Benjamin
A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.
— Russell Baker
I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.
— Kenneth Clark, Civilisation
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
— George Orwell
The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest, but if it is judged worthy by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.In fine I have written my work not as an essay with which to win the applause of the moment but as a possession for all time.
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.
— Paul Graham
Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
— Thomas Jefferson
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis
— Antony Beevor
Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.
— Ambeth R. Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat
The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: 'This is not who we are.' But not if you were standing where I was. It was hard to see the look in that palace tour guide's eyes when she talked about the American flag flying over the palace and not realize that ever since 1898, from time to time, this is exactly who we are.
— Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.
— Vasily Grossman
History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick, sibilant character. Hiss. (Ss.) Tih. Ree.He was a pig, a plain pig, in the morning, standing five feet ten on one hoof. He was a pig in slacks. He was a pig in school. He was a pig on the dotted line. But in my eyes it’s always the ones signing dotted lines that become pigs.Did this pig have a precursor? He did, indeed he did. In point of fact, dating all the way back to the Biblical Age. Oh where? About everywhere you look there's pigs giving that fancy ol’ snake a chase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can always count on a fuckin’ pretentious sarcastican for a fancy prose style.
— Brian Celio, Catapult Soul