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
History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
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
All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development
Friedrich Engels
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
[History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman.
Thomas Carlyle
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.
Edward Gibbon
The course of History reflects a continual contest between limited, orderly processes of development and historical accident.
H. Cord Meyer
History would be an impossible area of human reflection if there were no recurrent attributes of human nature.
Willson H. Coates
"History" is the name we as human beings give to the horizon of consciousness within which we live.
Harvey Cox