History Quotes

Poetry is written with tears, novels with blood, and history with invisible ink.

People don’t alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

One generation to change the text. One generation chooses to teach that text. The next grows, and the lie becomes history.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally — in short, with reason.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

History! Read it and weep!

History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.

History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly, the life of humanity or even of a single nation appears impossible.[Предмет истории есть жизнь народов и человечества. Непосредственно уловить и обнять словом, – описать жизнь не только человечества, но одного народа, представляется невозможным.]

History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also he said to be, at least, in as much as concerns truth.[translation by John Willis Clark]History is in a measure a sacred thing, for it should be true, and where the truth is, there God is.[translation by John Ormsby][La historia es como cosa sagrada; porque ha de ser verdadera, y donde está la verdad está Dios, en cuanto a verdad.]

History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.