The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.
Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.
If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me!
To study history is to study literature.
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
History is written by the winners.
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
There is properly no history, only biography.
Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
History: A distillation of rumor.
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details. But in history the matter is far otherwise. Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.
History is more or less bunk.
The historian amputates reality.
The Jews were destroying both Greeks and Romans. They ate the flesh of their victims, made belts for themselves out of their entrails, and daubed themselves with their blood... In all, 220,000 men perished in Cyrene and 240,000 in Cyprus, and for this reason no Jew may set foot in Cyprus today.
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