History

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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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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
  • 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.
  • 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, Speech on "War and Social Justice" at Binghamton University on November 8th, 2008.

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  • Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
  • Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
  • History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just screams, "Why don't you listen to me?" and lets fly with a big stick.
  • History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
  • History is not a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.
  • History is not to be searched for practical lessons, the applicability of which will always be doubtful in view of the inexhaustible novelty of circumstances and combinations of causes, but just this, that the mind acquire a sensitiveness an imaginative range.
  • History is the chronological account of Man.
  • History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
  • History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.
  • History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs,—privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof.
  • It is when the hour of the conflict is over that history comes to a right understanding of the strife, and is ready to exclaim, "Lo, God is here, and we knew him not!"
  • Learn from History as there is no better teacher.
  • Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
  • The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
  • To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.
  • The happiest times of humanity are the blank pages in the book of history.
  • The history of man is a series of conspiracies to win from nature some advantage without paying for it.
  • The world's history is a divine poem of which the history of every nation is a canto and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian—the humble listener—there has been a divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.
  • There is no history worthy of attention but that of a free people; the history of a people subjected to despotism is only a collection of anecdotes.
  • This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.
  • You cannot possibly understand History without first understanding History's past.
  • Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.
  • History is always on the move, slowly eroding today’s orthodoxy and making space for yesterday’s heresy.
  • I believe that the more you know about the past, the better you are prepared for the future.
  • History…is indeed little more than the register of the crime, follies, and misfortune of mankind.

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