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 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
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