People are always captivated by what has happened before them. These historical quotes honor our respect for the past and our knowledge of its various elements.
History as a discipline now demands more evidence and less bias than it has in the past.
We are lending our voices to those who have gone before us, and in the process, we are learning more about ourselves and where we come from.
These history quotes are all about delving into our past, discovering what history is, what it means to us as individuals, what we can learn from it, and what history is all about.
Everyone, from historians and writers to politicians and inventors, has an opinion on why the past is important and what history is all about.
“The study of previous occurrences, particularly in human affairs,” according to the dictionary, or “a branch of knowledge that records and explains past events.” As a historian, I would argue that history is so much more! But, while you read these quotations about what history is, I’ll let you make your own decision.
60+ Quotes About History To Know About It More Deeply
History has been the history of warfare.___Godfrey Reggio
History is a resource.___Laura Linney
History develops, art stands still.___E.M. Forster
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.― Winston S. Churchill
History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.– Graydon Carter
History is more or less bunk.____Henry Ford
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 history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.____Franz Kafka
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.____Victor Hugo
Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.― Steve Maraboli
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.___Will Durant
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.___Alexis de Tocqueville
History is a race between education and catastrophe.___H.G. Wells
History is philosophy teaching by examples. – Thucydides
History is a vast early warning system.__Norman Cousins
Human history in essence is the history of ideas.___H.G. Wells
The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?___David McCullough
If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ― Michael Crichton
A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.___Annie Besant
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.___Will Durant
History is information. Memory is part of your identity. – David Miliband
Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?___Emile Cioran
thus with a kiss I die.― William Shakespeare
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.____George Santayana
History provides no precise guidelines.___Douglas Hurd
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.― George Orwell
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.― Winston S. Churchill
History is merely gossip.___Oscar Wilde
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.___Karl Marx
By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.― Dan Brown
There is properly no history; only biography.___Ralph Waldo Emerson
History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.___Voltaire
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.― Vladimir Lenin
There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.― Stephen Colbert
History, a distillation of rumour.___Thomas Carlyle
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.___Voltaire
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.― Iain Banks
History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.___Lord Acton
People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn’t.― Christopher Paolini
The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.― Harry S. Truman
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.___Hermann Hesse
History is a set of lies agreed upon. – Napoleon Bonaparte
History shows that there are no invincible armies.___Joseph Stalin
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.― Robert A. Heinlein
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.___Hermann Hesse
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. – Aristotle
History is a relay of revolutions.__Saul Alinsky
I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for ‘history’. The closest word for it is memory.___David Miliband
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.___Martin Luther
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.___Karl Marx
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.― Zadie Smith
Black history is American history.___Morgan Freeman
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. – Karl Vonnegut
The first duty of a man is to think for himself.― Jose Marti
Quotes About People in History
We don’t merely think about the past when we think about history. We concentrate on specific events and persons.
History is, in many ways, a study of people: a series of powerful, notable characters who impact how we view different periods of history.
These personalities, ranging from politicians to religious leaders, prominent orators, and leading chroniclers, have a huge impact on how we think about the past.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.___G.K. Chesterton
The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.___D.H. Lawrence
Never say more than is necessary.― Richard Brinsley Sheridan
History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.___Anselm Kiefer
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.___Robert Kennedy
The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.― Marcus Aurelius
Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.__David Ben Gurion
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.___Anatole Broyard
It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.___Karl Marx
I’ve been completely fascinated with history because it tells everything about what’s going to happen next because it’s cyclical, everything repeats in general.___Emile Autumn
We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.― Chuck Palahniuk
It had long come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. – Leonardo da Vinci
On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.___Alfred de Vigny
History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.__Ted Coppell
History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.― James Fenimore Cooper
Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark.___Anne Sullivan
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill
Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history.___Eckhard Pfeiffer
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.___Golda Meir
People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven’t changed since time began. We’re still the same. We’ve obviously made some changes.___Colin Hay
Study the past if you would define the future.― Confucius
The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.___Bertolt Brecht