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.
Patriotism ruins history.
Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.[Notre ignorance de l’histoire nous fait calomnier notre temps.]
One generation to change the text. One generation chooses to teach that text. The next grows, and the lie becomes history.
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
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.
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
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 you know your history, then you would know where you coming from, then you wouldn’t have to ask me, who the heck do I think I am.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.[Very often misquoted as:] For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
