History Quotes

History can be well written only in a free country.[Pour bien écrire l’histoire, il faut être dans un pays libre.]

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day —

We should perceive that man’s period of historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental change.

Then how have you lived, if you have no history?[Так как же вы жили, коль нет истории?]

The so-called “materialistic conception of history” with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.[Die sogenannte »materialistische Geschichtsauffassung« in dem alten genial-primitiven Sinne etwa des kommunistischen Manifests beherrscht heute wohl nur noch die Köpfe von Laien und Dilettanten.]

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

The knowledge of the past times and of the places of the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind.[La cognizion del tempo preterito e del sito della terra è ornamento e cibo delle menti umane.]

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.[Die Menschengeschichte ist die Sekunde zwischen zwei Schritten eines Wanderers.]

Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.

Patriotism ruins history.

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.[Notre ignorance de l’histoire nous fait calomnier notre temps.]