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Quotes about history

176 quotes from 130 people

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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather1873–1947O Pioneers! (1913), Part II, Ch. 4
- Writing
The British Empire was the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government. Yet its mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism.
Niall Fergusonborn 1964Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), Introduction, p. xxvii
- Government
Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so.
Carl Jung1875–1961Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 33
- Thinking
History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history.
Thomas Pynchonborn 1937V. (1963), Chapter 9, Part I (Mondaugen)
Where does barbarism leave off and civilization begin?… We can hardly conceive ourselves to be the sole possessors of the only true civilization that the world has ever known.
Robert E. Howard1906–1936From a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (March 6, 1933)
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It’s very restful – because you read. There’s some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
Niall Fergusonborn 1964“The NS Interview: Niall Ferguson”, New Statesman (July 23, 2010).
I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.
Herodotus484–425 BCThe Histories, Book 7, Ch. 152.
- Truth & Lies
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
Franz Kafka1883–1924The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954)
- Time
I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate.
Leon Trotsky1879–1940My Life (1930), Ch. 45: The Planet without a Visa
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
Robert Graves1895–1985“The Persian Version,” lines 1–2, from Poems 1938-1945: Satires and Grotesques (1946)
- Truth & Lies
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
Arundhati Royborn 1961Come September (29 Sep 2002)
- Patriotism
What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
Friedrich Engels1820–1895Letter to Joseph Bloch (21 September 1890)
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Walter Benjamin1892–1940Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), VIII
- Politics
In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: “to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.”
Primo Levi1919–1987If This Is a Man (1947)
- Justice
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Howard Zinn1922–2010A People’s History of the United States (1980; 2003), Ch. 1
- Hope