Quotes and Sayings About History
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It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.
-- A. A. Gill -
Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.
-- A. A. Gill -
If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
-- A. A. Milne -
I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity. I know you'd better focus on the good stuff or you're screwed.
-- A. J. Jacobs -
Rather an end in horror, than horror without end. He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later. The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot him all the same if we have to. The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,Does this improve me?, not look at the possible fringe benefits If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
History is the great propagator of doubt.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
-- A. L. Rowse -
History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
-- A. N. Wilson -
It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
-- A. N. Wilson -
We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
-- A. N. Wilson -
Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.
-- A. O. Scott -
The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
-- A. Whitney Brown -
History is not history unless it is the truth.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.
-- Abram Joseph Ryan -
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.
-- Adam Garfinkle -
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.
-- Adolf Hitler -
We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.
-- Adolf von Harnack -
war with poison and chemicals was not so rare in the ancient world ... An astounding panoply of toxic substances, venomous creatures, poison plants, animals and insects, deleterious environments, virulent pathogens, infectious agents, noxious gases, and combustible chemicals were marshalled to defeat foes - and panoply is an apt term here, because it is the ancient Greek word for 'all weapons.
-- Adrienne Mayor -
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
-- Adrienne Rich -
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
-- Adrienne Rich -
If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
-- Agnes Repplier -
History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
-- Agnes Repplier -
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
-- Agnes Repplier -
History is not written in the interests of morality.
-- Agnes Repplier
