History Quotes

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Ambrose Bierce

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

David C. McCullough

There is a history in all men's lives.

William Shakespeare

History is written by the victors.

Winston Churchill

History is not narration' as Thierry thought, nor analysis as Guizot thought, it is resurrection.

Michelet

Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.

Geoffrey Barraclough

History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.

Randolph S. Bourne

[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

[History is] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.

Voltaire

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

Robert Penn Warren

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.

Goethe

History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose.

J. H. Plumb

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert
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