History

History repeats itself.

History is the study of human behavior through time. When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of past humans, families and societies as preserved primarily through written sources.

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History does not belong to us, we belong to it. ~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

Alphabetized by author

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time. ~ Terry Pratchett

The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui. ~ Helen Westley

• History repeats itself.
  • Anonymous proverb; popularized since the mid-1800s; already considered clichéd by 1865. "The most solemn humbug which does duty as a profound historical reflection is, that history repeats itself." Harper's, volume 30, p. 124, 1865
  • Widely attributed to various famous authors, who expressed similar sentiments – see Marx and Hegel quotes above.
  • An early attested form is "history repeats itself never" (reversing it), 1854, William Howitt The history of magic, Volume 2, by Joseph Ennemoser, translation William Howitt, 1854, p. 86

• The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.
  • Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (1992), "The Event Strike", p. 26

• Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
  • John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
  • See Hegel quote, below.

• What want these outlaws conquerors should have
  But History's purchased page to call them great?
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), Stanza 48.

• And history with all her volumes vast,
  Hath but one page.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), Stanza 108.

• History, a distillation of rumor.
  • Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, A History (1837), Part I, Book VII, Chapter V.

• Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.
  • Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.
    • Cicero, M. Tulli Ciceronis Orator Ad M. Brutum (46 B.C.)

• I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
  • Henry Ford, interview in Chicago Tribune (25 May 1916)

• History does not belong to us, we belong to it.
  • Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 276

• What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Introduction

• What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history ? A fable agreed upon.
  • Napoleon, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, v. 4, p. 251. However, the phrase predates Napoleon. Helvétius attributes it to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, De l'esprit (1758), p. 443

• Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
  • Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
  • See Hegel quote, above.

• Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
  • George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Chapter 3

• The past is just one long, smelly error until we get to the car, computer and iPod.
  • Laura Penny, More Money Than Brains, p. 23

• History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.
  • Terry Pratchett, in Mort (1987)

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
  • George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense (1905)

• History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.
  • Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, in Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) : Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (2008), p. 197.

• History is a big word..........History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.
  • Antonio Tabucchi, in Pereira Maintains (2010), p. 89

• 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, Chapter 8, Genius..., p. 67

• The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Part 7

• Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
  • Gore Vidal, interview in: Butt, Nr. 20, Special Summer 2007, S. 63.

• Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
  • Oscar Wilde "The True Function and Value of Criticism." The Nineteenth Century XXVII (July-December 1890): 137.

• The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui.
  • Helen Westley, as quoted in "The Confessions of Helen Westley" by Djuna Barnes in New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine (23 September 1917)

• If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.
  • Howard Zinn, War and Social Justice, speech at Binghamton University on 8 November 2008.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 368-69.

• Happy is the nation without a history.
  • Cesare Beccaria, Trattato dei Delitti e delle Pene (Treatise of Crimes and of Punishment). Introduction.

• History is a pageant, not a philosophy.
  • Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, The Muse of History.

• I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
  • Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, On the Study and Use of History, Letter 2. Also quoted by Thomas Carlyle, Essays, History.

• The dignity of history.
  • Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, On the Study and Use of History. Letter V. Fielding, Tom Jones, Book XI, Chapter II.

• Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Introduction, Chapter I.

• History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Essays, On History.

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

• History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Essays, On History.

• All history … is an inarticulate Bible.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets. 405.

• All history is a Bible—a thing stated in words by me more than once.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Quoted in Froude's Early Life of Carlyle.

• Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Life of Frederick the Great, Book XVI, Chapter I.

• Que voulez-vous de plus? Il a inventé l'histoire.
  • What more would you have? He has invented history.
  • Madame Du Deffand of Voltaire, who was accused by critics of lack of invention. See Fourier, L'Esprit dans Histoire, p. 141.

• The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.
  • Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ars Rhetorica, XI. 2, p. 212. (Tauchnitz Ed.) See Thucydides, Works, I. 22.

• Assassination has never changed the history of the world.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, speech, May, 1865.

• There is properly no history, only biography.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, History.

• The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
  • Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Chapter III.

• And read their history in a nation's eyes.
  • Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 16.

• The long historian of my country's woes.
  • Homer, The Odyssey, Book III, line 142. Pope's translation.

• History casts its shadow far into the land of song.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer, Ancient Spanish Ballads.

• They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Belfry of Bruges, Stanza 9.

• I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, History of England, Volume I, Chapter I.

• Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.
  • Montesquieu.

• [History] hath triumphed over Time, which besides it, nothing but Eternity hath triumphed over.
  • Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World, Preface.

• In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal; by the comparison and application of other men's forepassed miseries with our own like errors and ill deservings.
  • Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, Preface, Par, IX.

• Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.
  • The world's history is the world's judgment.
  • Friedrich Schiller, Resignation, 17.

• Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet.
  • The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
  • Schlegel—Athenæum. Berlin. I. 2. 20.

• Præcipium munus annalium reor, ne virtutes sileantur, utque pravis dictis, factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit.
  • The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.
  • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), III. 65.

• L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs.
  • History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.
  • Voltaire, L'Ingénu, X.

• Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.
  • Robert Walpole, I, Walpoliana, No. CXLI. Also in Advertisement to Letters to Horace Mann.

• Those old credulities, to nature dear,
  Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
  Of History.
  • William Wordsworth, Memorials of a Tour in Italy, IV. At Rome.

Misattributed

• History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
  • This is very often attributed to Mark Twain, but is not found in his works. The earliest publication yet located is a verse which might involve a deliberate invocation of poetic license in John Robert Colombo's poem, "A Said Poem", published in Neo Poems (1970), which reads: " 'History never repeats itself but it rhymes,' said Mark Twain."

• History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
  • Winston Churchill
  • Actually quote is:
  • For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (January 23, 1948); Cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), ed. Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 154 ISBN 0300107986