History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
Max Beerbohm
To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
Roy P. Basler
Do not applaud me. It is not I who speaks to you, but history which speaks through my mouth.
Fustel de Coulanges
History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
Fustel de Coulanges
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
O. W. Holmes, Jr.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose.
J. H. Plumb
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] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.
Voltaire
[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
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 not narration' as Thierry thought, nor analysis as Guizot thought, it is resurrection.
Michelet