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You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present. -
Hermann Hesse
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. -
Edward M Forster
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History books that contain no lies are extremely dull. -
Anatole France
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The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies. -
James A Froude
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To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man. -
Mahatma Gandhi
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History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. -
Edward Gibbon
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History tells us more than we want to know about what is wrong with man, and we can hardly turn a page in the daily press without learning the specific time, place, and name of evil. But perhaps the most pervasive evil of all rarely appears in the news. This evil, the waste of human potential, is particularly painful to recognize for it strikes our parents and children, our friends and brothers, ourselves. -
George Leonard
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The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. -
Eric Hoffer
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Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads. -
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other. -
Victor Hugo
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It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out. -
Sarah Orne Jewett
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Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary. -
Samuel Johnson
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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 F Kennedy
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Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history. -
Alphonse De Lamartine
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The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves. -
Marcus T Cicero
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